


She's The One

by jugheadjones



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: F/F, Fem!Fredsythe, Genderswap, High School, I swear..., Male Hermione, all the other characters are the same, also technically all the other characters arent the same anymore, and boy!gladys, any day now..., cheerleading, cuz im PLANNING on introducing boy!mary, pep rallies, some sexy times in chapter 13, trials of cheerleading 2 : electric boogaloo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-08
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2020-06-24 09:14:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 66,533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19720675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jugheadjones/pseuds/jugheadjones
Summary: It's 1991 and 16-year-old junior Freddie Andrews has life all figured out. She's popular, a great student and terrific all-around athlete, she's got a perfect boyfriend, and in a couple of months time, she's going to be voted prom queen.There's nothing to stop her from having the most perfect school year of her life - nothing except the new girl who just transferred to Riverdale High. The one who lives in the trailer park at the edge of town and rides a shitty motorbike to school.The one she's most definitely not falling for.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bisexualfpjones](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bisexualfpjones/gifts).



> title from bruce springsteen 
> 
> _And no matter where you sleep  
>  Tonight or how far you run  
> Oh she's the one_

**Monday.**

“BORN IN THE USA!,” belts Freddie Andrews at the top of her lungs, her favourite CD blaring from the speakers of her dad’s car as she swings around the corner into the Riverdale High School parking lot. Her shoulder-length brown hair is yanked back into a ponytail, but a few loose strands blow around her head in the breeze from the open windows. A few unlucky freshman scatter to avoid being taken out. “I WAS BORN IN THE USA!” 

The beat-up red convertible coasts down the front row of parking spaces, gathering speed until Freddie has to suddenly slam on the breaks to avoid a collision. There’s a crappy-looking black motorbike parked haphazardly across her usual corner parking spot, leaking a grimy puddle of oil onto the fresh pavement. 

“What the hell,” she complains, reversing back out into the row and turning into a different spot, the speakers still blaring. Parking spaces at RHS weren’t assigned, per se, but juniors and seniors could usually lay claim to a usual without too much trouble. Clearly, someone had missed the memo. Freddie twists the key in the ignition, cutting off the song mid-bar. Much as she’d love to dawdle in the parking lot until the last chorus faded away, she was sitting at two tardies in the past week-and-a-half. Another one would mean a phone call home to her dad, something she definitely couldn’t afford that week. 

Freddie leaves the hand-crank windows down- if anyone wanted her day-old Pop’s takeout and crumpled history notes they were welcome to them - and darts up the front lawn toward the school, dodging underclassmen and rowdy football players as she goes. Her heart skips a beat halfway down the hall when she recognizes Hank Gomez leaning against the locker next to her own. 

“You look great in that uniform,” her boyfriend greets her, kissing her on the cheek. 

“So do you,” replies Freddie, pausing to tug playfully at the collar of his deep blue sweater, uncovering one of the tiny mouth-shaped bruises she had left there last night. A pep rally was scheduled for that afternoon, and the entire cheerleading squad was outfitted in blue and gold. Hank, aside from being the most popular upperclassman at Riverdale High, was the captain of the cheerleading squad and a formidable base. Freddie had secretly had a crush on him since freshman year, and since they’d started dating she’d been catapulted into the running for prom queen. Hank grins and leans one well-muscled arm against the locker, flashing her a smile that melted her heart like butter. 

“Have you heard the bad news?” 

“What bad news?” Freddie tucks a binder under her arm and grabs her copy of The Great Gatsby, affording herself a quick glance up into Hank’s chocolate brown eyes. With his soft, dark hair, even gold skin, and perfect white teeth, he was easily the most attractive boy in school. He grimaces and runs a hand through his hair. 

“Marcus Mason is off the football team. Academic probation.” 

“Geez, it’s like a revolving door,” Freddie complains. Marcus, Riverdale’s quarterback, had originally been added to the team as Marty Mantle’s replacement after he’d been suspended for a fraternity prank. “What’s going to happen with the game on Friday?” 

“I guess Coach’ll tell us at the pep rally.” Hank tugs Freddie’s ponytail, and she slams her locker door and kisses him quickly. 

“I gotta go or I’m going to be late. But I’ll see you there.” 

“See you there,” Hank replies, sounding slightly put out by her haste. Hank hated when he wasn’t the centre of attention. But if Freddie was late for class one more time, she’d probably be helping her father clean gutters the night of the next dance. 

Freddie sprints down the hall on the toes of her sneakers and dashes into Mr. Howitzer’s homeroom class just as the bell stops ringing. Her best friend Alice Smith turns around in the front row to flash her an exasperated look as she skids into her chair, but Freddie ignores her. Despite their many differences, Freddie and Alice had been best friends since the second grade. They had to sit apart in homeroom because Howitzer had gotten sick of them whispering back and forth. 

“Thank you for joining us, Miss Andrews,” Howitzer deadpans, picking up a piece of chalk and dragging it down the chalkboard to begin to write the date. “Class, a reminder that tardiness will not be tolerated as part of our weekly routine. We have a lot of material to cover before the exam.” 

Alice reaches back with one hand, a folded piece of notebook paper neatly concealed inside her palm. Freddie leans forward and snags the note, quickly tucking it into the top of her pencil case. When Howitzer turns around and back to the board, she unfolds it. Alice has printed a single sentence in her neat journalistic hand: 

Heard about Mason? 

_Hank told me_ , she writes back, adding an angry face in purple gel pen. _Any idea whos replacing him?_

When she glances back up to the front of the class, Howitzer is newly occupied at the door, talking to what looks like one of the secretaries from the front office. Freddie takes the opportunity to rise up on her knees on the desk chair, leaning far enough forward to toss the folded note over Alice’s shoulder and onto her desk. As she’s leaning over, she feels someone tug the back of her skirt, and quickly whirls around. Marty Mantle and Hiram Lodge are sitting directly behind her, laughing silently. 

“Eat shit, Mantle,” Freddie spits out quietly, dropping back down into her chair. If she wasn’t on such thin ice with Howitzer, she would have slapped him then and there. Hiram is still laughing, and Freddie fixes him with the evilest eye she can muster up. She and Hiram Lodge had been rivals since tenth-grade drama class. There wasn’t a more pretentious asshole in the whole school. 

“Class, your attention please,” Howitzer barks from the front of the room, and Freddie quickly turns around again in her seat. The secretary is gone, and there’s a dark-haired teenager shifting awkwardly from foot to foot at Howitzer’s side. “We have a new transfer student joining our homeroom today. I expect you all to make her feel welcome.” 

A new transfer student! Freddie straightens her skirt and sits up a little taller. She loved meeting new people, and a new student was sure to shake up the Monday blues. Howitzer doesn’t look half as pleased, scowling as he introduces the stranger. 

“This is Forsythia Jones, from Midvale. Forsythia, please take a -” 

“F.P.” speaks up the girl. She has a low voice, hard and tough. “I go by my initials.” 

“Great,” drones Howitzer, looking less than impressed. “Please take a seat. I’ve ordered you a copy of the book, but in the meantime, you’ll have to look off someone else.” 

Freddie glances jealously behind her at the empty seat next to Hiram Lodge, but the dark-haired boy quickly drops a stack of books on the desk, preventing F.P. from sitting down. She heads instead to the only other vacant spot - a row ahead of Freddie, and three seats to the right. 

The position gives her a perfect view of the newcomer - F.P. looks effortlessly cool in black jeans and a Metallica T-shirt, her dark hair cropped short and spiky. There’s a studded choker around her neck, and her brown-black motorcycle boots must be vintage - they’re so worn that the leather is cracked and peeling. 

Freddie smiles in her direction, but F.P. is already squinting at the board. Freddie tears a sheet of clean notebook paper out of her binder and scrawls a note in the corner, completely ignoring the beginning of Howitzer’s lesson. 

_If it makes you feel better my name is Winnifred. I go by Freddie. I like your shirt._

Ripping it and folding it into a triangle, her heart pounding, she leans forward and taps Alice on the back. Alice glances subtly over her shoulder, and Freddie pushes the note into her hand and nods at the new girl’s desk. Alice raises an eyebrow, but leans over when Howitzer starts writing again and drops the paper on F.P’s notebook. 

Freddie’s heart is thumping harder than it’s ever beat in her life. Whenever she looks at the new girl, her stomach feels like it’s trying to crawl up her throat. Her legs feel shaky. She holds her breath and waits for the brunette to notice. 

F.P. looks surprised by the note. She glances behind her, and Freddie tucks her flyaway hair down and gives her a big friendly smile. F.P. turns around again, her expression unreadable. She flicks open the notebook paper and reads it. 

Then she crumples it into a tiny ball and tosses it into her desk. 

Freddie’s heart sinks all the way to her shoes. She stares at the back of F.P.’s neck for the rest of the class, but the girl doesn’t turn around again. When the bell rings, F.P. is up in an instant, bolting out the door and into the hall. Freddie hurries through her classmates to try and reach her, but by the time she gets to the door, the newcomer has disappeared. 

Second period drags by in a dull blur. Hank keeps talking about the pep rally to Penelope Blossom, one of their fellow cheerleaders, but Freddie is too put out to join in in their excitement. On top of it all, she has to worry about the loss of their quarterback. Mason was a bit of a dick, but he was instrumental in making sure the Bulldogs clinched a chance to win the season. Next Friday’s game was the all-important one against Baxter High that would determine whether Riverdale made the playoffs or not. Losing the season because of a last-minute replacement would royally suck. 

Being a cheerleader came naturally to Freddie - her disposition was upbeat, optimistic, and sunny enough to rival the hot June sky. But by the time their early lunch period rolls around, her usually peppy attitude had sunk into one of gloom and misery. To make things worse, Alice had declined to eat lunch with her as usual, quarantining herself inside the Blue and Gold newspaper office to meet a strict deadline. At least, that was the story. Freddie had a hunch she and her boyfriend Hal Cooper were knocking out more than headlines. 

There were dozens of other people she could have eaten with - Freddie had never had trouble making friends, and dating Hank had only made her more popular - but she wanders alone by the edge of the field anyways, scuffing her clean white sneakers in the grass. On instinct, she tugs up the silver cross she wears on a chain around her neck and nibbles on the metal. She’s about to turn around and try to find Penelope when she spies a dark figure across the field, sitting alone on the bottom step of the bleachers. 

Common sense tells her to leave it well enough alone, but Freddie had never been much for common sense in the first place. She crosses the field with her hands on her hips, her brown paper lunch bag swinging from one fist. 

“Hey!” she says when she gets close enough. 

The new girl glances up at her. Freddie can’t help noticing that she doesn’t have any lunch with her. An unlit cigarette is tucked behind her ear. She scowls unhappily at Freddie as soon as she sees her. 

“Can I help you, Cheerleader Barbie?” 

Freddie narrows her eyes at the derogatory nickname. She can’t help but feel that it isn’t even remotely apt - sure she’s wearing her coordinated sweater and pleated skirt, but she doesn’t have a lick of makeup on, and her double A cups certainly aren’t doing anything to make her look like a bimbo. She plants one sneakered foot on the bottom bleacher and sets her hands hard on her hips. 

“What’s your beef? I just wanted to say hi.” 

F.P. looks taken aback, but quickly recovers, hitting her with a glare that reminds her of Hiram Lodge. “You’ve said it. Buzz off.” 

Freddie’s mouth drops open. She’s never met anyone as rude as this girl in her life! F.P. pulls out a lighter and lights the cigarette, holding it between her lips and taking a long draw. 

“That’ll kill you, you know.” 

F.P. snorts and blows out a cloud of smoke, talking to the sky. “Exactly what I expected. Typical carbon copy square.” 

“What makes you think you know anything about me?” asks Freddie, bemused. “I’ve barely said anything to you.” 

FP shakes out her short, spiky hair. “Bad experiences with cheerleaders, I guess.” She sneers. “Why don’t you go play a real sport?” 

A real sport! That was it. Freddie could take all the personal digs in the world, but she wasn’t about to sit here and let some new girl be a dick about what she loved to do. 

“You know how much athletic ability goes into cheerleading, right?” Freddie snaps. “If you think you can do three backflips in mid-air and land on your feet, yelling at the top of your lungs the whole time, and do that for hours and not get out of breath, then go ahead and show me. But we train harder than any other team at this school, and I should know because I’m on the track team too. And I play basketball in the winter. And I’m the MVP of the baseball team. The _boys_ baseball team,” she couldn’t resist adding. That she’d been permitted a spot on the otherwise all-male team was a personal point of pride. “So, why don’t you - why don’t you go stuff that up your butt!” 

The girl just looks at her. Freddie can feel her face turning bright red. No matter how mad she was, her cheeks always betrayed her. F.P. takes a drag on her cigarette. 

“Why not football?” she asks. 

“What?” 

“You play everything else, it sounds like. Why not football?” 

Freddie deflates a bit from her furious posture, sinking back onto her toes. “We haven’t got a girls’ team. Not even flag football or anything. But-” she shrugs. “I’m more of a baseball girl anyway. I weigh 120 pounds soaking wet. I’d probably get wiped out in a tackle.” 

For a moment she wishes she hadn’t dropped her guard enough to be self-deprecating, but the new girl laughs. Not in a mean way, either. And something about the laugh makes Freddie’s knees go weak all over again, and body ache like she had to go to the bathroom. 

Reaching into her brown paper bag, Freddie unearths a wax-wrapped sandwich and cautiously lowers herself onto the bleachers. “What bad experiences have you had?” she asks curiously, unwrapping the sandwich and holding out half. “With other cheerleaders?” 

F.P. takes it, and then quickly looks away. “Nothing,” she mutters. “The girls at my old school were just bitches, that’s all. Although-” she looks Freddie up and down again, and Freddie’s skin tingles. “Even _they_ didn’t wear their uniforms to school every day.” She takes a bite of Freddie’s sandwich, holding the cigarette with the same hand so that it sprinkles the bread with ash. “That’s new.” 

“We have a pep rally next period,” Freddie explains. “Everyone wears their uniforms to school on pep rally days.” She sighs. “Although it won’t matter much if we can’t replace our quarterback.” 

F.P. looks interested for the first time, speaking around a mouthful of sandwich. “What happened to the old one?” 

“Academic probation. He flunked everything.” 

“Oh.” F.P. takes another huge bite of ham. She turns up her nose, but Freddie can tell she’d gotten through to her. “Shouldn’t you be there now, then? With all the other squares?” 

Freddie glances at her watch and swears under her breath. Their lunch period had gone by quicker than she’d expected, and she was at least ten minutes late for warm up. 

She glances regretfully up at F.P, who looks at her at the same time, and her stomach gives a little lurch. The new girl’s eyes were the darkest, deepest brown she’d ever seen in her life. _She was so pretty._

“What class do you have last period?” Freddie asks quickly. 

“Chemistry,” F.P. replies. “But I was going to skip because of this rally thing.” 

_Skip on your first day?_ Freddie wants to ask, but she doesn’t want to be called a square again. “I have chemistry too,” she replies instead. “Flutesnoot’s class. If you come, F.P, maybe we can get a burger after.” 

F.P. looks surprised, but nods. “Wait-” she calls out when Freddie’s walked a few feet away. Freddie turns, and F.P. stands up, brushing the dirt from her worn jeans. 

“You can call me Thea if you want.” She stubs out her cigarette under her boot. “Short for Forsythia.” 

Her lip curls at her full name, and Freddie grins. “Deal. See ya.” 

“See ya,” the taller girl replies softly, and maybe Freddie’s imagining it, but Thea’s hand flies up to nervously tuck a lock of her dark hair behind her ear, and Freddie can’t help but memorize the motion. There was something _about_ the new girl - something that made her heart pump and her vision blurry and her mind float away as easily as it did in Haggly’s tedious history class. Her mouth has gone dry and she quickly licks her lips, wiping her sweaty hands on her pleated skirt as she nods and turns away. 

She’s fourteen minutes late to the warmup, and for the first time in her life, she couldn’t care less.


	2. Chapter 2

It was the sandwich, Thea Jones thought. She’d gone crazy over a ham-and-cheese sandwich. 

It was an understandable weakness. When she’d left for her first day of school that morning, all there’d been in their shitty trailer park fridge was a bottle of mustard and a gloopy jar of jam - both leftovers from the couple that had been forcibly evicted from the place right before she and her father moved in. 

Thea was finding clues as to their unhappy courtship all over her new home - burn marks on the wallpaper, a fist-sized hole concealed under a painting of a trout, and the weird smell rising from the carpeting. Her father was far more concerned with drinking than food shopping, and was hardly the type to make sure his only daughter had enough to eat. She’d been subsiding on half-melted candy bars from her secret stash of snacks since they’d moved in. 

So when Cheerleader Barbie with the toned calves and the perfect size-four hips and the bouncy red scrunchie holding up her ponytail had offered her lunch, Thea had lost her head. Just for a second. Just long enough to look into her caramel eyes and listen to her traitorous brain whisper _I like her_ as she took the half-ham-and-cheese from her hand. Enough to jump up like her ass was on fire and blurt out the nickname she’d planned to leave behind in Midvale. 

Thea. Cheerleader Barbie had scrunched up her nose in a smile when she’d said it, enough for Thea to notice that she had a sparse smattering of light brown freckles on her nose. Her eyelashes were a soft brown, and her lips were the kind of pink that didn’t need lipstick. Thea had noticed all these things in a split-second that felt like a lightning bolt. Now, watching the stranger walk away with a bouncy step over the grass, she tried to shake every fond thought out of her head. 

Thea didn’t fuck with popular girls. And she _especially_ didn’t fuck with cheerleaders. This Freddie bitch would stab her in the back in two days, or else leave her high and dry once she got bored. And considering Thea’s track record with cheerleaders, that would be a best case scenario. 

She scratches idly at her knee - it was too hot for jeans, but Thea didn’t wear a lot of shorts - and fumbles for another cigarette. At her old school there had been strict rules about smoking on school grounds and she had no doubt it was the same old schtick here. That said, she planned to dirty up the place with her cigarette butts until she was told to stop. 

Popping the roll between her lips, she averts her eyes from the sway of the other girl’s pleated skirt as she disappears into the distance. She had nothing to worry about, she soothes herself. Freddie would forget all about her once it was clear Thea wasn’t interested in her life. She lights the cigarette and sucks in a lungful of nicotine, feeling pleasantly light-headed as it relaxes her. 

One thing was for certain - she wasn’t going to this stupid pep rally. She had her bike and about five bucks to her name: if she headed out now, she could scrounge up something real to eat before her father would expect her home. 

Thea stands and stretches, purposefully keeping her gaze trained toward the parking lot instead of the school doors, where Freddie had disappeared. She’d spend the rest of the day how she liked it - alone. 

As far as she was concerned, the end of this school year couldn’t come fast enough. 

* * *

**Tuesday.**

“I just don’t understand how you forgot about our date,” Hank argues, his dark eyes burning into Freddie’s as she bends her head to fiddle with her locker combination. He runs a hand through his hair, ruffling it up in the back in a move calculated to make him look as irresistible as possible. “We always go to Pop’s after school. Especially after a pep rally.” He pouts adorably, mussing his hair again. “Everyone was there.” 

“I’m sorry, I completely forgot,” Freddie lies, averting her gaze. “I had to study.” 

Truth be told, she just hadn’t felt like showing up. When she’d bounced into Chemistry after yesterday’s pep rally, Thea had been nowhere to be seen. And although she’d waited around the hall until the last students had filed out, the new girl had never reappeared. She hadn’t expected them to be best friends instantly, but her heart had still stung when Thea had so blatantly avoided her. Eventually, she’d decided she’d rather head straight home than go hang out with half the school and stuff mindless calories in her face. Something in her had wanted to be alone, and she’d ended up spending half the night with her guitar, soothing herself by plucking out quiet songs until her father had yelled at her to go to bed. 

Coach Kleats’ announcement at the rally had been exactly what everyone had expected - tryouts would be held on Thursday night to fill Marcus’ position for the rest of the season. The news had been greeted with a great hum of interest from the student body, as well as some whooping and cheering from Marty’s friends, who clearly assumed Kleats would become desperate and reinstate him as a quarterback. The sign-up sheet was hanging outside the gym office, but so far there were only a sparse handful of names on it. The whole school was buzzing with the question of who the new quarterback would be, and if it would affect Riverdale’s chance at the playoffs. 

“There’s Alice,” says Freddie quickly, slamming her locker shut and kissing Hank on the cheek. Her heart still sped up at the touch of his warm skin, but her head felt a million miles away. It wasn’t like her to be so obsessive over football - it was usually baseball season that had her losing sleep. But for some reason, she’d been tossing and turning all night. She takes off at a run to catch up to her friend, falling into step beside the blonde and leaving Hank staring after her. 

“Say hi to Hal for me,” Freddie cracks, pointing at a fresh hickey on Alice’s neck. Alice slugs her hard in the arm. 

“Shut the hell up. Like you and Hank weren’t all over one another last night.” 

“We weren’t, actually.” Freddie straightens her necklace nervously, lifting it unconsciously to her lips to nibble at the silver cross. 

Alice raises an eyebrow, glancing back over her shoulder. “Trouble in paradise? You two seemed pretty cozy at the pep rally.” 

“I don’t know,” says Freddie, chewing her lip. “Is it really good to be with the same guy for a whole year? Or isn’t it better to date more than one person? Really figure out what you like, you know?” 

“Hello?” Alice snaps her fingers abruptly in front of Freddie’s eyes. “Last week you were saying you wanted to marry him.” She imitates Freddie’s lovestruck voice. “ _I’m going to marry him, Alice. He’s the love of my life._ Ring a bell?” 

Freddie sticks her tongue out. “Well sue me for changing my mind.” 

Alice gapes. “You mean it.” 

“I don’t know what I mean.” Freddie shrugs hopelessly. “Forget it. I want the scoop on quarterback tryouts.” 

Alice rolls her eyes. “You know as much as me. I’m sick of wasting my talent on sports coverage anyway. I’m trying to get the Blue and Gold to run more human interest pieces. Speaking of which-” she waves her notebook at Freddie. “Did you talk to the new girl yesterday?” 

Freddie’s heart jumps like she’s fallen over the crest of a rollercoaster. “Why?” 

“I was thinking about interviewing her. Asking her about the differences between her old school and this one, bla bla bla. Miss Smitt loves school spirit stories, and it’s a slow news week.” Alice takes in Freddie’s flushed expression. “What’s your problem?” 

“Nothing, I just - she might not interview well. She’s kind of - uh -” Freddie brushes her cheek with the back of her hand to feel how hard she’s blushing. “Abrasive.” 

“I can do abrasive.” Alice pops a piece of gum into her mouth and offers one to Freddie. Howitzer was a stickler for the rules against gum chewing, but the pair had mastered the art of hiding it until his back was turned. “But if she’s a real bitch I won’t waste my time.” 

“She’s not a real bitch,” Freddie argues nervously. “She’s probably cool.” 

Alice looks at her curiously, and Freddie glances interestedly down at her beat-up converse, relieved when Alice changes the subject. “Hm.” the blonde offers noncommittally. “How’s your half of the history project coming? This better be one bangin’ diorama. I did pretty much all the written work.” 

“It’ll be great,” Freddie promises with a grin. “Ye of little faith. Remember how great my solar system was?” 

“Mars was a rotten apple!” 

“It wasn’t rotten when I made it!” Freddie’s eyes slide automatically to the new girl’s desk as they walk through the door of their first period class. Thea’s head is bent over her book, and she’s drumming her fingers nervously on the corner of the desk. Freddie finds her eyes drawn to Thea’s bruised knuckles, the bandage wound around the joint of her middle finger. She’s wearing the same jeans and boots, but her shirt is a gray t-shirt with a torn collar, and the fabric is streaked here and there with oil. 

“Hi Thea,” Freddie speaks up when she gets close enough, but Thea doesn’t reply before Howitzer starts pounding on his desk with a ruler. The man ran homeroom like a military unit. 

“Class, take your seats please.” he drones tonelessly. “This means you, Miss Andrews.” 

Fighting the urge to roll her eyes - the gesture had once got her a week's detention for “attitude problems” - Freddie hurries to her seat. To her dismay, Thea doesn’t look up at her once. 

For most of the class, she tries to focus on the board, but she’s given an excuse to glance back at the brunette’s neck when Howitzer calls on the new girl to explain the definition of _antithesis_. Thea struggles so badly through a hackneyed definition that Marty Mantle - someone who certainly couldn’t spell the word, let alone define it - starts sniggering loudly and openly. Freddie whirls around and kicks his desk - just hard enough to upend the soda that he definitely wasn’t allowed to have in class. 

The brief pandemonium that ensues does its job in more ways than one - Marty gets slapped with detention after class, and the heat is off Thea by the time Penelope Blossom has run for paper towels and the mess has been blotted up. Freddie waits hopefully for the other girl to turn around, if only to seek out the source of the chaos, but Thea sits as still as if carved from marble, her head hanging down toward her desk to expose her bare neck. 

When the bell rings, Freddie makes her way toward Thea’s desk, pausing in the space between the new girl’s desk and the door. 

“Hi,” she says, heart pumping. Freddie had packed an extra sandwich in her school bag that morning, just in case Thea had forgotten hers again. “I was wondering if you wanted to have lunch together? I have an off-campus pass. If you’re not skipping, that is.” She adds a quick laugh, remembering the musical sound of Thea’s laugh yesterday. 

Thea’s eyes flicker up to her, deep brown under her messy tumble of bangs. Freddie puts on her best most inviting smile. But- 

“No thanks,” says Thea coldly. She stacks her books into a pile and rises from her chair, almost knocking Freddie over in her haste to get out of the room. 

“But-” Freddie tries to speak up, but Thea just shoulders past her, bumping into her arm and knocking Freddie’s pencil case out of her grip. It explodes open as it hits the floor, sending pens shooting across the room. Howitzer, at his desk, raises an eyebrow. 

Her face burning with humiliation, she crouches on the ground to retrieve them. By the time Freddie stands up again, Thea is long gone into the crowded hallway. 

Swallowing her embarrassment and rage, Freddie spins on her heel and shoves her way out the door. 

* * *

“She’s such a bitch!” Freddie rants, pacing back and forth in front of Alice, Hank, and Hal. The four of them are in the newspaper office, waiting for Alice to put the finishing touches on an article so that they can eat outside. “I’ve literally been nothing but nice to her, and she acts like I’m diseased!” 

“What do you want me to do?” Hank asks, picking through his sushi lunch with chopsticks. He’s standing by the door, his broad back against the American flag. “Want me to ruin her reputation?” 

Freddie slaps him hard in the chest. “Shut up! Don’t you dare! I’m just pissed, that’s all.” 

“Freddie, you’re freaking out for no reason,” Alice speaks up, eyes focused on the school’s brand new word processor as her fingernails tap on the keys. Hal is looking over her shoulder. “Some people are just assholes.” 

“But-” 

“Forget about it,” Hank advises, grabbing Freddie playfully around the waist. Ordinarily she’d be thrilled by the gesture - play-fighting was a mainstay of their relationship, and part of the reason Alice had declared the two of them so sickening together - but today she just pulls out of his grip. 

“Hank, you don’t understand.” 

“Why? She’s just a loner, Freddie. Why are you so obsessive about it?” 

“Done!” Alice smacks the desk triumphantly and stands up. “Let’s go get a spot before all the good ones are taken.” 

Staking out a picnic table at the edge of the parking lot, the group spreads their lunches out and settles down to eat. Hank’s hand lands on her thigh and Freddie laces their fingers together on instinct, but inwardly she’s still fuming. The group seems to have forgotten about her predicament entirely - Hal is going on and on about Marty’s plan to get back on the football team, and Hank and Alice are nodding along. 

“Of course it would be great for him to get his old spot back,” Hal says, stirring the container of pasta salad his mother had packed. “But I wonder if Kleats will want to add in some new blood. I hear some of the best players on the junior varsity team are really angling to get in there.” 

The sputtering roar of an old motorbike interrupts his speech. Freddie turns her head just in time to see the black, oil-streaked bike tear across the parking lot and out onto the street, revving its engine loudly in the quiet air. Thea’s peeling combat boots are planted firmly on the pedals, her dark denim-clad legs hugging the edges of the bike. She blasts through the school gate and out into the street, disappearing into the treeline until the rev of the engine is all that remains in the air. 

“Noise pollution,” says Alice, taking a big bite of her sandwich. “That’s the subject of my next article.” 

Freddie fingers the wax paper covering her second sandwich and says nothing. 

The thing is, Freddie Andrews had a secret, and the secret was this. She loved girls. Not just loved them, but _really_ loved them, the kind that made your heart pound and your knees weak and your throat ache with all the ways you wanted to say it. The trembly, fiery, passionate kind of love that she was only supposed to feel for boys. For people like Hank Gomez. 

She hadn’t realized that everyone didn’t feel like this until she was halfway through the fourth grade. But back then it was just girls she’d never have a chance with - pretty girls she saw on TV, like Demi Moore or Jennifer Grey. The rest of the time, she just pretended that the feelings didn’t exist, and then they went away, or got muddled up inside her until they disappeared. Sometimes it had cost her friendships - like Emily from her basketball team, or Hannah from swim camp. But it was always worth it to feel normal again. 

Then there was her older brother’s girlfriend, Chelsea. Chelsea had given her a hug at the funeral, and for those perfect, sweet forty-five seconds, Freddie had forgotten that her brother was dead. Had forgotten everything, in fact, but the smell of Chelsea’s perfume and how soft her skin was against her cheek. She’d been so in love and so scared of it that she’d just about floated away. 

She hadn’t seen Chelsea since then, and she’d prayed that that had been the end of it. Dating Hank was such a relief because she felt so many things for him - real, mushy, heartsick things, the things you were supposed to feel for boys. Normal things. She could dream about him, gossip about him, write songs about him for her band, plan a future with him in it. 

Only it was no use lying to herself anymore. Because every love song she’d played to herself last night hadn’t been about Hank. 

It had been about Thea. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Wednesday.**

Thea wakes with a start from a dream where she’d been kissing someone. _Who_ it was she couldn’t quite make out before reality set in, but she had a feeling it was one of two options. Especially from the way her father had reacted in the dream - the warmth of the kiss dissolving as the bigger man had grabbed her and swung his palm into her face to break her nose. That was how she’d woken - clutching her face and choking on blood that she was relieved to find was only imaginary. 

It’s still early - only six in the morning. Thea tiptoes cautiously into the living room of their trailer, and is greeted by the sound of her father snoring away on the couch. His head is thrown back over the arm, and there’s a half-finished bottle of whiskey lying inches from his palm. Thea’s heart curls up at the sight. She’d been stupid enough to hope that their move would push their dad to at least pretend to make an effort, but it seemed like since they’d moved into Sunnyside he’d been drinking more and more. Soon he might stop coming home at all - and the jury was still out on whether that would be a bad thing, or an improvement. 

She steps lightly as not to wake him - years of practice have trained the instinct into her limbs, though he’s snoring so heavily she could probably stomp around unnoticed - and heads to the fridge. On her way home from school she’d stopped at a convenience store for orange juice and about a week’s worth of beef jerky and pepperettes. The meat she hid in her nightstand - her dad was liable to throw out anything he knew was hers, or else eat it himself when he was on a bender - but she’d rather drink piss than warm OJ. Tilting the carton to her lips, she swallows heavily a few times, cutting herself off a little earlier than she’d like and stowing it back on the top shelf. Until she figured out the school lunch issue, rationing herself was always the best order of business. 

Closing the fridge rattles the myriad of beer cans tucked into the bottom of the door, but her dad doesn’t even stir. Thea sneaks back into her room and treats herself to a whole half-bag of beef jerky, stuffing pieces in her mouth in between getting dressed. She’d have to start eating healthier once she was playing football again, but for now it would have to do. It wasn’t like she had a whole lot of options. 

Football. Her eye is drawn to the calendar she’d taped clumsily above her bed. Today was the last day the list for tryouts would be up at her new school. There was no putting it off anymore. 

If there was a girls’ team at Riverdale, there would be no issue. But girls’ teams never got any shots at scholarships, and they were usually no contact football anyway. The position of quarterback emphasized speed and agility over physical strength, but Thea was still looking forward to getting her frustrations out at practices. There was nothing she liked more than the worn-out, exhilarating feeling of slumping home exhausted and bruised after a game, her mind blissfully quiet for the first time in weeks. 

Thea also had her own reasons to avoid sharing a locker room with other women. Plus, girls could be catty and cliquey and terrifying. Thea was always on edge around them. Just take that airhead Freddie Andrews, for example. One look at her, and Thea had felt flung out of space and time, as uncomfortable in her own skin as a stranger. 

Unknowingly, though, Freddie had done Thea a favour - she’d somehow already paved the way for girls in boys athletics by getting that baseball position she was so proud about. So maybe Riverdale was just all kinds of liberal. Or at least Thea had a leg to stand on if anyone wanted to fight with her about it. 

Pulling on her jeans and a black tank top, Thea ties a flannel shirt around her waist and laces up her worn motorcycle boots. She frowns as some of the leather flakes away under her fingers - they were ugly, but they had always held together all right. It pissed her off to think about Freddie’s cheerleading sneakers that first day they’d met - blinding white and clearly brand new. You just knew that little purchase had gone on Daddy and Mommy’s credit card. Girls like that had all the money in the world, and didn’t have a clue what to do with it. 

Thea had smirked to herself when they’d driven over the railroad tracks on the way out of the nice part of town and into the trailer park - _wrong side of the tracks_. How hard-hitting could the metaphor get? But she had to admit after two days at Riverdale High that it really was that black-and-white. 

There were two sides to this world, and Thea had been born on this one. Girls like Freddie were as far away from her as the moon. 

* * *

“I’m late!” hollers Freddie as she dashes down the stairs and into the kitchen, skidding in her sock feet and sliding across the linoleum into the front hall as effortlessly as she would on a skating rink. In the old days, her mother would have tossed her a bag lunch underhand, and Freddie would have caught it with one fist and complimented her form. But Bunny Andrews doesn’t look up from her mug of tea, and her father, Artie, doesn’t even bother to reprimand her tardiness. 

Freddie grabs an apple and takes a huge bite, leaving it in her mouth as she stumbles back into the front hall and drops to the floor to grab her jacket from where she’d let it fall last night. 

It’s not like she blamed her parents for being such total space cadets - Freddie had no idea what it feels like to lose a child, and she sure as hell didn’t ever want to find out. _But they’ve still got one_ , she rages privately as she pulls on her sneakers, not bothering to tie the laces. _Sometimes they act like I don’t even exist._

“Freddie-” her mother calls, and Freddie pokes her head back into the kitchen, feeling guilty for her angry thoughts. 

“Yes?” 

“If you’re going to sleep in Oscar’s room, would you please change the sheets after school today?” Her mother’s lips barely move with the request, and Freddie sees the muscles in her father’s jaw stiffen as he stares at his paper. “And maybe dust.” 

“Okay,” replies Freddie hollowly, and ducks back into the front hall. Her eyes are filling with tears, and she doesn’t even know why. It was like every time someone said Oscar’s name it released a spigot in her that never went dry. 

Sleeping in her dead brother’s room wasn’t something she’d meant to do - it had started accidentally, when she kept sleepwalking in there in the middle of the night. At this point it felt more familiar to her than her own attic room, the blue walls and college pennants and sports trophies as comforting as a heartbeat. She could lay for hours with her eyes half-closed in the blurry sunlight of morning, watching dust float through the air and the sun glitter on brass and it would feel like she was a kid again, and Oscar was still alive. 

Sometimes it felt like she spent more time in that world than her own, lately. She’d gone in there to find some toy soldiers for her history diorama, and had ended up staring at the ceiling fan for hours, punching her fist into Oscar’s baseball glove until her knuckles went cracked and bruised. 

It was so unfair. One minute, and it had changed their entire family. She closes her eyes to shake away the images she keeps picturing - the twisting metal, the broken glass, the blood - 

“Honey?” Her mother’s voice again. Freddie gets up and walks back into the kitchen, hovering in the doorway. Bunny looks up from her mug of tea, but Freddie can tell it’s long gone cold. Her eyes are big and sad. Her dad still doesn’t look up. 

“Let me write you a note,” her mother says quietly. “You’re going to be late.” 

* * *

The Riverdale High cheerleading squad forms a perfect pyramid on the football field, their blue-and-gold uniforms vibrant against the cloudless sky. The top tier rustles their pom-poms high in the air, their voices high and bright as they chant in time. One by one, they toss their pom-poms to the grass and dismount, landing in perfect time to the Rick Springfield song pounding out of the school boombox. 

Thea, slouched against her motorbike in the school parking lot, uses the convenient cover of a minivan to train her eyes on the after-school practice. It’s hardly worth lying to herself, but she narrows her eyes at the spectacle anyway, hoping anyone who might see her would think she was watching out of spite. 

There was certainly enough to find sickening among the display - the cutesy little skirt-and-sweater sets, for one, with matching slacks for the boys and the school R emblazoned hugely on every chest. _R for repulsive_ , she thinks with a scowl, and decides to file the quip away for the next time she talked to Freddie Andrews in person. _If_ they ever spoke again - and never would be okay with her. 

The thorn in her side is easy to pick out from the crowd - Freddie’s clearly the loudest and most hyper among them, leaping and rustling her pom-poms without a care in the world. Thea had always been the first to dismiss cheerleading as sexist nonsense, but she has to begrudgingly admit that Freddie’s good. There’s a certain magnetism about her performance that some of the other girls are lacking, an easy, pulsating energy that draws the eye subconsciously to her. Thea waits and waits for her to make a mistake, to get boring, but the glimmer never fades. 

Her physical form isn’t awful either - long tanned legs accentuated by the shortness of her tiny blue skirt. Thea has to keep tearing her eyes from the line where the fabric meets her thighs, cursing herself for giving in to the flicker in the pit of her stomach. Sure, Freddie’s cute in a tomboyish way - long and lanky, with fluffy hair and big doe-brown eyes. But she also has a boyfriend on the squad - the typical slick-haired, broad-shouldered heartthrob type that made them look like two halves of a TV couple. Every time he lifts her they look like a billboard ad for a good college. It’s enough to make Thea gag. _No thanks._

Enough is enough. She shoves her body weight off her bike, using the cover of a line of cars to make her way invisibly toward the gymnasium doors. The cheerleaders were facing away from the parking lot, but apparently, she couldn’t be too careful. Preppy Freddie Andrews seemed to have a sixth sense for Thea’s presence - she’s stopped saying hello, but it felt like Thea couldn’t go two steps without catching a glimpse of her. It didn’t help that they shared two classes - first period English and last period chemistry. Thea felt like she could feel those big brown eyes on the back of her skull wherever she sat. 

The sign-up sheet for quarterback tryouts is posted outside the men’s changeroom. A few guys in letterman jackets are having a conversation nearby, but Thea strides confidently up to the list anyways, pen gripped firmly in hand. 

There’s a good number of names - MARTY MANTLE is scrawled at the very top, and Thea has to scoff. She might be new at the school but the guy was impossible to avoid, and Thea had a very low opinion of him. She raises pen to paper and scrawls her name in the very slender gap at the bottom of the page. 

“Excuse me.” Thea glances up to see the football coach, a balding man in a RIVERDALE ATHLETICS T-shirt, smiling apologetically at her. “I’m sorry, but the players have to be here in person to add their names. There’s no signing up for other people.” 

“I’m not,” says Thea. The guys in letterman jackets glance over. “I’m adding my own name.” 

The coach looks blankly at her. “You’re signing up for the tryouts?” 

Thea lifts her chin slightly, looking him right in the eye. “I am. And I’m good. I don’t expect you to pick me unless I’m the best.” 

The coach laughs out loud, as though the whole thing is a joke. Thea gives him an icy glare and he quickly switches his expression to clueless, scratching his head. A bemused half-smile remains at the corner of his mouth that Thea wants to knock off. “You - ah - realize this is a men’s team?” 

The two boys in letterman jackets laugh and jostle one another, turning their full attention to the conversation happening in the hall. Thea tries to ignore them. 

“I heard there wasn’t a girl’s.” 

“That may be so, but I’m afraid it’s impossible.” The coach shakes his head again and takes the list down off the wall, the smile still in place as he speaks to her in a condescending voice. “Co-ed teams may be all right for _cheerleading_ , but we’re talking about boys who are two or three times your size. I think you women are underestimating the risk of injury when-” 

Thea’s voice drips poison. “If I’m a good quarterback there’s no risk of injury. And I’m fully aware of what the game entails, thank you.” 

The coach’s smile slides off at her tone. “I’m afraid it’s against the rules,” he says curtly, in a voice that implies he’s not at all sorry about it. 

“What rules?” Thea challenges him. 

The coach smirks in a self-satisfied way. “You’re new here, aren’t you? Have you had a chance to read the school rulebook?” 

Thea flushes hot pink and clenches her hands into fists. “No. But-” 

“I have,” speaks up a feminine voice behind her. Thea whirls around to see Freddie standing there in her cheerleading uniform, pom-poms dangling from her hand and a grass stain on her thigh. She takes a step toward the two of them in the hall, flashing the coach a toothy smile. “Cover to cover, Coach. Baseball, basketball, football, cheerleading. There’s no rule against girls playing on boys’ teams.” 

The coach stares her down, a muscle twitching in his jaw. “Freddie, I understand that you may think you know how things work around here. But pitching for the baseball team is the exception, not the rule.” 

“So it’s all right for her, but not me?” argues Thea. “You haven’t even seen me play!” 

The coach frowns, looking down with displeasure at the two of them. “I don’t think you realize how far you’re taking this women’s lib thing.” He laughs. “Soon we’ll have more girls than boys on the men’s teams, and then where will we be?” 

“Maybe you’ll actually win some games,” Thea jumps in snarkily. Freddie hurriedly rushes to cover her, stepping in between the two of them and folding her hands politely behind her back. 

“Coach Kleats, I think what Thea means is that she loves football, and she wants the best for our team.” Thea stares at the back of Freddie’s ponytail, and wants to yank it. “And if there’s even a chance that she could help us bring home the championship, she really wants to try. Since there’s no rule against it, doesn’t she deserve a chance to try? The benefit of the doubt?” 

“It’s all I’m asking for,” Thea says firmly. She didn’t need Freddie Andrews to fight her battles. 

“Come on, Coach,” protests one of the boys in letterman jackets mockingly. “You’re not serious about this, are you?” 

Coach Kleats looks from the boys to the girls, looking monumentally disturbed. “I’ll - I’ll have to talk things over with the principal. We’ll have to verify that there isn’t any such rule, of course.” 

“And if there’s not?” Freddie asks politely. “Thea should be free to try out, shouldn’t she? It’ll be completely up to you to make the final call, of course. She just wants to attend the tryouts.” 

Thea wants to speak up in her own defence, but something tells her to hold her tongue. Freddie’s act is charismatic and convincing, and she can tell the coach is softening somewhat. Enough that the boys in letterman jackets are getting pissed. 

“This is bogus,” one of them complains, and Thea narrows her eyes at them, hands curling into fists. 

“Doesn’t the school board have an anti-discrimination policy?” Freddie speaks over the boy, and flashes the coach a toothy grin. 

“Get to class,” the coach snaps at the two football players. He turns back to Thea, looking as baffled as ever. 

“You understand this won’t make you very popular. Not everyone might be so - uh - open-minded.” 

“I don’t care,” replies Thea. She tucks the pen in her pocket, and nods at Freddie, who nods back. “I just want what’s best for Riverdale High. School spirit, and all that.” 

“Hear hear,” says Freddie heartily, and the coach’s frown lines deepen, but he seems to have run out of excuses. 

“I’ll see you tomorrow afternoon,” he says stiffly to Thea, and walks back into his office. 

When they’re outside the gym doors, Thea draws her gaze to the ground, scuffling her shoes in the dirt. She doesn’t especially want to thank Freddie for her help, but refusing to say thank you at this point would be as much an admission as acknowledging it. She settles for muttering “thanks for your help in there,” her eyes locked on the horizon line. 

“It was nothing,” says Freddie, as cheerfully as if Thea had given her a big kiss on the cheek. “I’ve been through that, remember? And I’m not really surprised. I had a feeling that first day when you asked me about football that you were planning this,” 

Thea turns to her at last, and her gaze must be as hard as stone because Freddie’s smile finally falters. _I don’t want to be friends with_ you, Thea almost says. But then she looks at Freddie - really looks at her, her doe-brown eyes and her heart-shaped face and the smattering of freckles on her nose - and something furls open in her heart so clear and so honest that she can’t ignore it anymore, can’t even try for one second. 

Her stomach growls. She hasn’t eaten since that 6am beef jerky. 

“What were you saying about a burger?” she asks. 


	4. Chapter 4

Freddie leads her to a formica-topped table at the rear of a diner that looks like it hasn’t been redecorated since the nineteen-fifties. The glow of various neon signs up near the ceiling gives the place a casino-like aura, and some sprightly bubblegum pop is issuing from the direction of a glowing jukebox. 

“Don’t go anywhere,” says Freddie, hopping up from her seat as quickly as she’d sat down. “I want to change the music. Any requests?” 

“No,” says Thea, eyeing an elderly couple at the bar. She has a feeling heavy metal wouldn’t fly with this crowd. “Whatever you want.” 

Freddie goes skipping off to the jukebox, and a gum-chewing waitress sets two laminated menus down. Thea reaches for the nearest one, impressed by the heft of it. She flips it open and scans the first page, her stomach already cleaving with emptiness at the sight of all the descriptions. A rock song she kind-of recognizes fills the room, and Freddie bolts back into the booth, taking hold of the back and swinging herself in feet-first instead of sitting. 

“What’s your flavour?” she asks, when she lands. 

“My flavour?” 

“Of milkshake!” Freddie taps the menu. “I’m peanut butter. But sometimes if it’s a slow day, Pop makes me a peanut butter-chocolate-banana. Those are the best. I can ask him if you want to try.” 

Thea glances down at the menu options. “Chocolate, I guess.” She taps a photo on the menu - a heap of whipped cream and crumbled toppings. “What the hell is this one?” 

“Oh, it’s awful.” Freddie’s enthusiastic, bright-eyed grin implies she finds it anything but. “Pop calls it Pop’s Special Concoction. A whole pan worth of brownies, covered in caramel sauce and fifteen scoops of ice cream, whole m&m cookies, marshmallows, three whole bananas, a mountain of whipped cream, chocolate fudge sauce on top, and seven maraschino cherries. If you finish it without puking, you get your picture on the wall of fame.” 

She gestures to a wall above the counter, where a sparse handful of glossy photos have been backed with construction paper and hung up. Thea snorts. 

“That’s the most small-town thing I’ve ever heard.” She scans the photos as the waitress brings them two glasses of water. “Has anyone ever done it?” 

“Never,” replies Freddie solemnly. “Harry Clayton got all the way down to the bottom, but he left like, a ton of melted ice cream and brownies. I think Pop would have counted it, though, if he didn’t throw up a bunch of times in the bathroom right after.” 

Thea takes a sip of her water, pulling a face. “Doesn’t seem worth it, just to get your photo on the wall.” 

“You get free food for a year, too. But yeah, you’re probably right. Once the whole baseball team bought one for all of us, and we barely finished it.” Freddie grins at the memory. “They let me have all the cherries, though, ‘cause they’re my favourite. That’s probably as far as I'll get alone.”

They fall into a companionable silence, Freddie bending her head to examine the dessert options on the menu. She scratches her cheek idly, and Thea’s eyes flicker to track the motion. A short brown curl has tumbled loose from her ponytail and is hanging in her eyes, and Thea has a sudden urge to tuck it behind her ear. She stares down at the table, willing the impulse away. She can tell Freddie’s being polite with her silence, letting Thea come to her - there was no way she had to study the menu when this looked like just about the only restaurant in town - but something about knowing that sets her teeth all the more on edge and makes her squirm in the vinyl booth. 

“Aren’t you going to ask?” Thea speaks up quickly. 

Freddie looks up at her, that wispy curl tumbling down next to her ear. “Ask what?” 

“You know. Why my family moved here. Where I’m from. How I’m liking my new school.” 

Freddie smiles at her and drops her menu onto the formica. “Well, I’m dying to know. But I figured Alice would get to all that when she talked you into interviewing for the school paper.” 

“Alice?” 

“The blonde girl I sit with in homeroom. I don’t know if you’d like her. She’s kind of -” Her nose crinkles up as she laughs. “Well, abrasive.” 

“I don’t like most girls,” Thea replies. “All catty and always caring about their makeup.” 

Freddie shrugs. “That sucks.” 

“What sucks?” 

“When girls say they don’t get along with other girls,” Freddie replies. “Because they’re too catty, or whatever. I get it. I mean, I always got on better with boys growing up. But boys - they kinda suck, dude. They’re not there for you when you really need them, you know?”

“I dunno.” Thea pushes her hair back. “I never really got on with guys either.” 

Freddie cracks a smile. “Who did you get on with, then?” 

“Food,” Thea replies, and Freddie laughs. 

“I guess some girls aren’t like that,” Thea admits, rolling her eyes. She thought Freddie was being unbearably preachy about the whole thing. But Freddie misses the grudge in her voice, nodding energetically. 

“Oh, and boys can be so high-maintenance, you have no idea. My boyfriend, Hank literally cuts his fingernails every morning and every night. And he won’t let me-” Freddie blushes suddenly, and busies herself with her fries. “ _ Anyway, _ I hear girls and boys say that all the time, and it just seems kind of mean. Especially ‘cause Alice is like, my best friend ever.” 

“What makes her so great?” 

Freddie hesitates, nibbling a fry. Then she says: “She was gonna switch lab partners last week so I could sit next to you in Chemistry.” 

Thea snorts and looks back down at her menu. “You’re coming off as totally obsessed with me.” 

“Can you blame me? You just signed up for the boys’ football team, dude. You’re cooler than everyone else in this school put together.” Freddie leans forward. “Are you nervous for tryouts?” 

“Please. I’ve been playing football since I was seven.” 

“Shit, no way. I’ve been playing baseball since I was six!” Freddie’s face has lit up so much that her eyes are shining and her hair seems to glow in a golden halo - or maybe it’s just the autumn sun outside the window. “There was this big sandlot at the end of my street growing up, where my brother and his friends played. They let me join. Well, I insisted. He taught me pretty much everything I know. And then one day I was better than him and, well, now I'm here."

“I joined a boys’ team because it was a good way of getting my aggressions out,” Thea admits. “Turns out I was good at it. Does he go to Riverdale?” 

“Who?” 

“Your brother.” 

“Oh.” Maybe she’s imagining it but Freddie draws into herself a little, staring down at where her fingers have begun to tap nervously on the table. “No. He graduated.” 

“Got it.” Thea decides not to push a touchy subject. She knows a lot about dysfunctional families. “I’m an only child, but it’s better that way. Trust me.” 

Freddie opens her mouth as if to disagree, but they’re interrupted by the same waitress, approaching their table and snapping open an old-timey yellow notepad. Freddie nods in a familiar way at her and she smiles. Freddie has that effect on people, Thea’s noticed. They just grin in her presence. 

“Do you know what you want?” Freddie asks her. 

“Yeah.” 

“Cool.” She turns to the waitress. “I’ll have a peanut butter shake, and an Elvis burger. With fries to share. And she’ll have-” 

“Pop’s special concoction, please,” says Thea, closing her menu with a slap. 

Freddie’s jaw drops. The waitress pops her eyes out as if to say  _ really? _

“Thea-” whispers Freddie in a worried voice. 

“It feeds thirty-five,” adds the waitress warily. 

Thea just smiles. “You can bring it out with her food.” 

“Do you really think you can finish that?” whispers Freddie, as the waitress walks away to confer with the bowtied man behind the counter. Both of them stare openly at their booth. 

“I can try,” says Thea simply, and hides her grin at Freddie’s shocked expression. The truth is, no, maybe she doesn’t - but she’s had nothing to eat all week but beef jerky, and she knows damn well she can eat a hell of a lot of free brownies and ice cream. “Gotta start making a name for myself in this town, don’t I?” 

“Football wasn’t enough!?” Freddie’s voice is halfway between laughter and horror. “I can’t watch you do this. You’ll  _ die. _ ” 

Pop - the black man in the bow tie with a huge afro - walks over to introduce himself and shake her hand. 

“You have to finish it all in one sitting,” he warns her. “No more than two hours.” 

Thea smiles. “I’ll do it in one.” 

Pop describes the sundae to her, and again asks if she’s sure. Thea nods her head, and he looks more than a little impressed. 

“No sharing,” he warns them, glancing at Freddie. “Or at least, if you share you forfeit the prize.” 

“Not even the cherries?” Thea asks innocently. “They’re her favourite.” 

Pop looks over at the cheerleader. “She can have two.” 

Thea beams and reaches out to pump his hand again. “You’re on.” 

Freddie’s head swivels to watch Pop’s retreating back as he heads back into the kitchen. When she turns around to face Thea again, her eyes are huge. “You have tryouts tomorrow!” she almost yells. “What are you doing!?” 

“Relax,” Thea insists, “That’s a whole day away. Trust me. I know what I’m doing.” 

* * *

Freddie’s pretty sure every eye in the diner is on them when Pop brings the sundae out. It’s the most intimidating ice cream dish she’s ever seen - served in a boat-sized glass bowl, the heap of ice cream is topped with a fizzling sparkler and a liberal dose of colourful sprinkles. Far from looking horrified, Thea grins like it’s Christmas morning. The second the waitress hands her a long-handled spoon she dives directly in, burying her hand up to the knuckles in whipped cream to pull up a scoop of brownie, ice cream, and chocolate sauce. 

Their waitress sets Freddie’s burger and fries down in front of her, but Freddie doesn’t touch them. Her eyes are glued to the sundae as Thea swallows the first bite and throws her head back, making an exaggerated “mmmm” noise. 

“Maybe it’s just because I’ve been starving all week,” she says aloud, digging her spoon back in. “But this is the best goddamn brownie I’ve ever tasted.” 

Freddie realizes her jaw is hanging open and closes it with a click. “Why have you been starving?” 

“Your cafeteria food sucks,” Thea replies nonchalantly, licking the whipped cream off her hand and scooping a huge spoonful of ice cream. “And my dad hasn’t had time to go grocery shopping yet.” 

She plunges her spoon back in, digging all the way to the bottom to get at the brownie. “Where are you l-” Freddie begins, but Thea interrupts her. 

“What’s on yours?” She points at Freddie’s burger with her spoon before licking the handle. 

“Banana and peanut butter.” Freddie replies, lifting it to her lips. Thea laughs and digs up a huge chunk of cookie. “That sounds worse than this.” 

“There’s nothing worse than that.” 

“You don’t see meat on this, do you?” Thea shrugs, popping a mouthful of mostly whipped cream into her mouth. “Meat and bananas and peanut butter. Weird. Not that I’m picky. Food’s food.” 

Freddie laughs out loud, gesturing to the sundae. “Apparently.” 

Thea grins quickly, her teeth stained with chocolate, and Freddie’s heart does a leap. She hadn’t been lying - she really does think Thea is the coolest girl she’s ever met. Something about her makes her so tongue tied she can barely speak. Her mind is racing a million miles an hour, but she can barely get the words out when she goes to talk. 

"Where do you live?” Freddie asks, remembering that she’d been interrupted. “Do you like your new house?" 

"Um..” Thea stuffs a huge mouthful of sundae into her mouth. Freddie waits patiently for her to chew, but Thea’s taking her time. She casts her gaze back down at the sundae, furrowing her brow. “I think it’s called….. um……” 

She licks her spoon clean, glancing around the restaurant. “Elm street?” she asks. It’s more question than statement. 

Freddie’s jaw drops. She hadn’t seen a moving truck on their street, but Elm Street was long and wound all the way up a hill. Imagine that she and Thea had been neighbours all this time and hadn’t known it! “Shut up!” she almost shouts. “I live on Elm Street! We’re neighbours! You know the big yellow house? That’s me!” 

To her surprise, Thea shakes her head quickly, her cheeks turning pink. “Sorry, no, I’m wrong. It’s not Elm. It’s some other, um - tree name.” 

“Oak?” Freddie asks, mildly disappointed. “No- Maple?” 

For a moment a flicker of annoyance crosses Thea’s face, and Freddie almost apologizes - though for what, she has no idea. But then her friend sits up and pushes her hair back, and a veneer of cool unaffectedness settles about her like rain, and Freddie’s mind goes curiously blank except for the place where she’s zeroed in on the tiny smear of whipped cream on Thea’s upper lip. 

“Let me eat this,” Thea says nonchalantly, nodding her chin at the enormous sundae. “We can talk after. I told Pop I’d do it in an hour.” 

“You’re crazy,” Freddie replies. “No one can eat that in an hour.” 

“Watch me,” Thea answers. She unzips her jeans and yanks her tank top down to cover the gap, momentarily putting her cleavage on display. She has nice breasts- wide and firm and perfect. Freddie quickly looks up at the ceiling so Thea won’t think she’s staring. 

“What?” Thea asks, clearly picking up on her weird behaviour. Freddie’s palms are beginning to sweat. “You don’t think I can do it?” 

“I don’t know,” Freddie says honestly, looking her slowly in the eyes again. She suddenly remembers her own milkshake and takes a steady sip from the straw, never breaking Thea’s gaze. “Show me.” 

“I’ll show you,” Thea says with a smirk, popping one of the whipped-cream laden candied cherries into her mouth and crunching it. “Just watch.” 

She picks up her spoon and digs in. Thea seems to have a strategy - she starts with the bottom layer of brownie, demolishing it before turning her attention to slicing the cookies and bananas into pieces. The whipped cream she gives an experimental stir and leaves well enough alone, taking a few scoops of ice cream with the brownie but leaving the rest to melt into a grey sludge. Not only is she eating it, she seems genuinely hungry - and stops only once, pressing her fingers into the side of her temples and causing Freddie to almost leap up from the table in concern. 

“You don’t have to finish-” Freddie jumps in. 

“Ice cream,” Thea interrupts, holding her head. “It’s freezing my brain. Give me a sec.” 

Freddie dunks a fry in her own milkshake and contemplates the dish in between them. Thea’s somehow demolished all of the brownie and toppings, but what remains is a mountain of softening ice cream that would turn the stomach of a professional eater. No matter how hungry she had been to start with, there was no way anyone could finish that easily. Thea fishes two ice-cream covered cherries out of the bottom of the dish and dangles them above the table between them. 

"As promised."

Freddie leans forward and bites the cherries right out of Thea's fingers. The darker brunette laughs surprisedly, sucking her fingers clean before sneaking them across the table to snag two of Freddie’s french fries. 

“What are you doing!” Freddie exclaims, biting down on the candied cherries so that sweet red liquid spills over her lower lip. She wipes it self-consciously away. “You can’t seriously need my fries right now.” 

“The ice cream’s too sweet,” Thea complains. “I need something salty.” 

“Finish your sundae!” 

“I’m trying!” 

Thea shoves the fries in her mouth and chews them, giving the remains of her dish a hearty stir as she sips her water. Freddie watches her stir the ice cream over and over, softening it further and turning the mountain into a bowl of soup. 

“I’m going to suck it down like a milkshake,” Thea announces at last, tossing down her spoon. “Are you ready?” 

“Thea, slow down,” Freddie protests worriedly. “I really think you might die.” 

Thea just grins. She grabs the bowl with both hands and tilts it up, bringing the rim to her lips and tossing her head all the way back to expose her pale neck. Freddie just stares as she swallows and swallows and swallows, slowly draining the heavy bowl as effortlessly as she’d suck back a water bottle after practice. She drinks the whole thing without coming up for air and then plunks it heavily down on the table, her face flushed in victory and her hair stuck to her cheeks. Freddie's heart drops into her stomach and keeps falling as she recognizes the feeling burning up in her gut. 

Fuck, she thinks. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. 

Love, that stupid thing she was supposed to feel for her boyfriend. It was Chelsea, but worse. It was Gloria Lopez in third grade, but worse. It was every feeling she'd ever tried to hide from herself, bubbling up in her like a pot of unwatched spaghetti. She was hopelessly, endlessly, irrevocably smitten.  _ Fuck.  _

A few people in the diner start clapping, and Freddie’s jolted back into herself. Thea’s scraping the sides of her empty bowl down, smiling to herself and looking pleased as punch. Freddie’s jaw almost hits the table when it registers. 

_ No way _ , thinks Freddie. The situation was too absurd. No way was she sitting here with a girl who hated her guts, having just watched her finish the biggest sundae she’d ever seen in her life in under an hour. Only Thea doesn’t seem to hate her anymore. They lock eyes for a moment, and suddenly Thea starts to laugh. 

A grin spreads slowly across Freddie’s face as she watches her. It’s the first real, genuine laugh she’s heard out of the girl, and the sound is contagious. Thea laughs at her, a dynamite, eye-squinting, full-body laugh, and Freddie can’t help but giggle in reply. By the time Pop approaches them to officiate the end of the competition and declare Thea the champion, they’re both clutching the table for dear life and dissolving into hysterics. 

“You did it,” Freddie manages, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes. “I’ve never seen anyone do it. You’re unreal.” 

“Free food for a year?” Thea’s asking Pop. She looks almost like she’s about to cry too. “Really? No conditions?” 

“None,” Pop assures her, and pulls out his camera. Thea ducks her head away, camera shy, but Freddie lunges across the booth and catches her wrist. Thea turns her head obediently and Pop snaps a picture. 

“How are you feeling?” Freddie demands the second Pop walks away. 

“Full,” replies Thea, and laughs at the top of her lungs. 

“I’m serious!” Freddie leans forward, propping her elbows on the sticky table and frowning anxiously. “You have football tryouts tomorrow!” 

“You’re a real worrier, you know that?” Thea, amazingly, reaches for another of Freddie’s fries. “Is that all you’re going to eat?” 

Freddie sticks her tongue out at her, but finishes the rest of her burger in a couple bites. She goes to wash it down with her milkshake and hits the bottom of the glass, slurping it obnoxiously through the striped plastic straw. Thea suddenly lifts her hand to the amazed waitress. 

“Another milkshake for the lady, please.” She nods to Freddie when the waitress approaches, immune to the other girl’s protests. “Banana, chocolate malt, and as much peanut butter as you can manage. Oh, and triple maraschino cherries on top.” She turns to Freddie with a smile that she can’t help but return, and the gesture is so simple and so immense that it feels like the beginning of the world. “Did I get it right?” 

* * *

They stay long enough at Pop’s that the sun is beginning a slow climb down below the treeline when they leave. Artie had taken his car into work, so Freddie was left with the truck that Oscar had been fixing up before he died. It was hers now - the last piece of him she had, besides the dusty room they had left a museum. True to form, she had left Oscar’s mess in the glovebox - had even left the CD’s in the centre console, despite absolutely hating his music. Loss made you nostalgic for the worst parts of other people. 

She has her almost-full peanut butter-chocolate-banana milkshake in a to-go cup, the condensation cool in her hand. Thea’s full and sleepy - she’d almost drifted off against the back of the booth before they’d left, so Freddie had raised her hand one last time for the check. She needn’t have bothered - Pop gave them everything on the house. 

Thea’s walking slowly now, looking uncharacteristically happy. In the few shorts days Freddie had known her, Thea had always seemed nervous and on edge. Now she’s calm, the sharp, cracking energy that Freddie had come to associate with her conspicuously absent. 

They’re crossing the parking lot toward the truck when a gleaming BMW with a finish like poured butterscotch comes shooting across the road and almost runs them over. The tinted windows are cranked down, and some kind of obnoxious rap music is blasting on the stereo. Marty Mantle is hanging out the passenger side window in his letterman jacket, and Freddie doesn’t even have to check to know who’s behind the wheel - the custom license plate HIRAMLODGE spells it out for her. Freddie tries to switch directions, but the car leaps forward, cutting her off. 

“Heard the news,” Marty yells at them above the music, leering at Thea and acting as though Freddie doesn’t exist. He makes an obscene gesture with his hand and tongue, grinning. “You really think you can cut it with the big boys, baby?” 

Thea narrows her eyes and stands her ground, her voice cold. “If you’re the biggest boy I have to worry about, I guess the position’s mine already.” 

Marty flips her the middle finger, a sour look on his face. “You bitches are too much,” he mocks. “You think you can just do whatever the fuck you want in life. I’ve got bad news for you - you’re going to look like shit tomorrow. There’s no women’s lib on the field, honey.” 

“Eat shit, Mantle,” Freddie replies, flipping him off in return. Usually, she was one for more colourful insults - she had something half-planned about asking what had died in his collar - but decides the finger was worth a thousand words. She switches direction, but the car keeps rolling forward behind them. 

“Are you two going to make out or what?” The horn honks, and Freddie whirls around furious. Hiram’s grinning at the whole situation from the driver’s seat, and it makes her blood boil. Marty makes some other tongue gesture. “Keep an eye on that one,  _ F.P. _ ” He manages to make the two initials sound as mocking as a slur. “She’s got a hell of a stick up her ass for someone so easy. You wanna know what we call her?” 

Freddie takes a step back so she’s in line with Thea. “Run for the truck,” she says out of the corner of her mouth. 

“What?” 

“Follow my lead.” She looks passively into Marty’s smirking face and quietly pops the lid off her milkshake. Then she rears back with her right arm and delivers a world-series winning pitch - fired right through the open window and directly onto the upholstery of the expensive car. The milkshake explodes on contact, spraying up into the windshield and across all of the seats. The dense, sweet aroma of peanut butter fills the autumn air. Freddie’s fingers are sticky from the spray. She can only imagine how the upholstery must feel. 

“WHAT THE FUCK!” Hiram is suddenly screaming, his voice at a register that could probably summon dogs. “WHAT THE FUCK!” 

Freddie’s truck is only a few parking spaces away, but they sprint to it anyway, lunging for the doors of the cab and scrambling up into the seats at top speed. Freddie fires the engine and shoots the car backward out of the parking lot, swinging the wheel around in a wide arc as she floors the pedal and sends them flying across the railroad tracks. They can hear Hiram screaming behind them for blocks. They’re almost back at the school by the time Thea turns to look at her, her face glowing and her body shaking with laughter. 

When Freddie pulls up next to Thea’s motorbike, Thea actually leaps out of the car and jumps up and down. Freddie joins her, leaving the engine running, and the two of them scream together, laughing and dancing in the empty lot, wheezing for breath. 

“Did you see his face!?” Thea howls. “What a fucking idiot! They didn’t see that coming!” She leans back against the side of the truck, breathless and laughing, her hair out of place. She pushes it back at the front, still grinning. “Shit. Maybe you’re right about girls. I’ve never had anyone stick up for me before.” 

“My mom says a girlfriend is better than a boyfriend,” Freddie replies, and then hurries to correct herself. “A friend who’s a girl, I mean.” She glances at the ground, suddenly embarrassed. “You know. Not like-”

“No, I got it.” They fall into a moment’s silence, both breathing heavily. “You weren’t kidding about your arm,” says Thea finally, shoving herself up off the truck. “Give me some pointers sometime?” 

Freddie grins. “Only if you teach me how to play football.” She pats the side of her truck. “Do you want a ride home? We can put your bike in the back.” 

Thea’s exhilaration suddenly dissipates as quickly as it had come. Her face falls and her eyes lose their sparkle. She purses her lips, and her face suddenly looks like a mask. 

“No,” she says stiffly, avoiding Freddie’s eyes. “I’d rather bike home.” 

“Oh, okay.” Freddie does her best to hide the way her stomach sinks. “Well… Cool, y’know, doing this. If you want to do it again-” Thea’s reaching into the cab of the truck for her backpack and leather jacket, her face impassive. “Well, I mean, I’ll see you at tryouts tomorrow. Good luck?” It comes out like a question. 

Thea smiles at her as she zips her jacket up. “Yeah. See you around, babe.” 

Freddie’s heart stops beating. “Babe?” 

“Yeah, you know.” Thea straddles her bike. “Babe Ruth. He played baseball.” 

“Oh.” She can feel herself blushing. “Right. The Bambino.” 

“Yeah. Don’t tell me you’re not a nickname person. Not with a name like Winnifred.” 

So she  _ had _ read the note. “Says Forsythia,” Freddie teases. “We sound like two old ladies in a retirement home.” 

Thea snorts. “I’m never getting old.” She revs her engine, kicking one boot up onto the footrest. “See you tomorrow.” 

“Drive safe,” Freddie answers. She won’t lie - the sight of the thrumming bike engine makes her nervous. Even on the quiet streets of Riverdale, it would be all too easy to crash. But Thea acknowledges her with just a wave, guiding the bike out of the lot and roaring off down the street until she’s just a speck in the distance. 

Freddie stares after her, and suddenly realizes she’s grinning again. No matter where she stood with Thea, one thing was for certain: Freddie wouldn’t miss these tryouts tomorrow for the world. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Thursday.**

“Okay, I’ve got some hot gossip.” Alice slides into place at their lunch table, her cheeks flushed in the way that they only got when she had had a good news day at the Blue and Gold. “Melinda told Sierra who told Tom who told Cliff who told Penelope who told Hal who told me that Hiram saw this new girl sign up for quarterback tryouts yesterday.” 

She looks from Freddie to Hank, then visibly deflates. “You already know, don’t you?” 

Freddie cracks a grin. “I was there too. We had to throw our weight around before he’d let her do it. I told him there was nothing against it in the rulebook.” 

“Coach Kleats is such a dick,” Alice says sourly, peeling the wrapper off her straw. “Why do you know so much about this new girl, anyway? I still haven’t met her.” 

“We have chemistry together,” says Freddie, and then blushes. “Last period, I mean.” 

Alice raises an eyebrow, but turns to speak to Hank. 

“Do you think she’s serious about it?” 

“Oh, she’s serious,” Freddie replies. “Believe me. And she’s going to be the new quarterback.” 

Alice takes a bite of her sandwich, but her curious gaze lingers on Freddie a little too long for comfort. “Well, it’ll be interesting journalism, in any case.” 

“I don’t get  _ why  _ a girl would want to be quarterback,” Hank speaks up. “Sounds messy. Those guys are going to beat up on her. Not to mention, she’s a new student and doing something like that is total social suicide.” 

“Social suicide!” Freddie speaks up, throwing a french fry at him. “Is that what you thought about me joining the baseball team?” 

“Well, didn’t Marcus Mason call you a-”

“Fuck off, Hank!” Freddie stands up abruptly, carrying her tray with her. “I’m going to eat somewhere else if you don’t stop it.” 

“Stop what? I think it’s fine that she’s trying out, I totally accept that. I just don’t know why she’d  _ want _ to-” 

“If you don’t understand, then just shut up about it!” Freddie snaps. 

Both Alice and Hank stare after her as she marches off across the grass, her tray held high in front of her. 

“What IS her problem?” Hank complains to Alice, who’s reaching for the juicebox Freddie had left behind. Before Alice can reply, Hiram Lodge suddenly appears, flying into Freddie’s vacated seat and ignoring Alice completely. 

“You seen your psycho girlfriend today?” Hiram demands, getting up in Hank’s personal space. Hank looks shocked at his daring. 

“Excuse me?” he asks, unimpressed, shooting a look at Alice.  _ Get a load of this guy.  _ “Can I help you?” 

“You can help your freak of a girlfriend pay for the repair bill to my car.” Hiram slaps a paper down on the picnic table. “That’s what you can do.” 

“What did she do, hit it in the parking lot?” Alice asks, smirking. “Are you sure it wasn’t Penelope?” 

Hiram glares at her before switching his attention back to Hank. “You’re just lucky I needed a new car anyway.” He straightens his back up importantly, tapping a well-manicured nail on the bill. “Daddy bought me a top of the line Porsche. It’s in my usual spot if you want to see it. The paint job’s called Guards Red.” 

“$5000 for new upholstery?” Hank glares at Hiram, crumpling the paper up and tossing it onto Alice’s dirty tray. “You’re crazy. Why the hell was my girlfriend in your car anyway?” 

Hiram is leaning way into Hank’s personal space. “You have to harness that bitch, Gomez. She’s fucking insane.” 

Hank gives Hiram’s shoulder a shove back. “Where do you get off talking to me like that?” 

Hiram looks delighted by the fight. “You want to make an enemy of me? How’s that working for you so far?” 

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Alice breaks in, rising from the table, “but the testosterone is getting too much for me.” She rolls her eyes at the two of them. “I’ll see you next period, and you can tell me how this plays out.” 

She can feel both their eyes on her as she strides toward the other tables, doing a sudden about face and heading toward the school doors, in the direction Freddie had disappeared. Something was up with her best friend, something more than anyone was telling her. And it was her journalistic duty to find out what. 

* * *

Thea groans when she yanks on the handle of the changeroom door after school and finds it locked tight. Of course the janitor hadn’t bothered to unlock the women’s changing rooms for the men’s football tryouts. She retraces her steps to the bathroom and tosses her duffel bag into the biggest stall, locking the door quickly behind her and rifling for her athletic pants and t-shirt. If she changed quickly, she’d have time to run a few laps in addition to her usual warm up before tryouts began. 

Stepping out onto the field, though, Thea realizes that quietly running laps is going to be out of the question. The bleachers on either side are packed with students, far more than she’s ever seen at a tryout. Coach Kleats is setting up an obstacle course, and the audience looks almost as busy as a game day. She’d heard Riverdale kicked school spirit up a notch, but this was insane. Realizing they were all here to see her made her knees start to shake. Usually Thea never had problems with tryout nerves. But no one could be expected to stay calm with hundreds of eyes on them, most of which probably hoping she would choke. 

Just for a second, she wishes she could run back into the school and hide. But by chance her eye manages to pick Freddie out from the crowd, sitting front and centre with a few of her fellow cheerleaders. Freddie waves, and Thea lifts a casual hand in reply, her heart beating hard against the front of her chest. She takes in a deep breath, enjoying the feeling of the sun streaming across the field and the breeze blowing toward her. She was in her element here. This was the one thing she could do well. 

Not wanting to look idle with so many eyes on her, she jogs over to the bench and tops up her water bottle, going through a few routine stretches and lacing her shoes. There are nine other hopefuls: a few fresh-faced sophomores that she knows are going to be cut right away, some bigger juniors, and the ex-quarterback Marty Mantle himself. He’s busy annoying the bored-looking assistant coach with some questions, but Thea still gives him a wide berth. She doubts he’d dare to try anything so publicly, but she had no doubt he wanted her hurt more than anyone else in the school. 

Coach Kleats blasts his whistle and motions them all out onto the field. Thea’s adrenaline is already pounding, but the first order of business turns out to be standing on the fifty-yard line and listening to the coach rant about dedication. 

“I only coach winners,” he’s saying, pacing back and forth on the grass. He’s clearly a BMOC past his prime - balding and overweight but with the shredded calves of a professional athlete. He jabs his clipboard hard with his pen as he talks. “Winning means your team comes before anything. Before your girlfriend. Before your personal grudges. Before your vacation. Before your social life. Before your boyfriend,” he adds, with a nod to Thea. She can feel herself blush. A few of the other players shift awkwardly from foot to foot, muttering amongst themselves, and Kleats gives them a stare until they quiet. 

“Winning at football is fifty percent mental,” he continues. “I don’t care how quick your footwork is if you don’t have what it takes. It takes guts. It takes practice. It takes hardiness. It takes dedication to your team. Quarterback is a leadership position, not a selfish one. Everyone on the team is looking to you to lead them, and if you don’t measure up, that’s going to embarrass me and to everyone on this team. This is not a position for quitters. This is a position for champions who know they have what it takes.” 

He stops pacing, taking a deep breath and mopping his already damp forehead with his hat. Then he’s off again. “Putting your team first also means keeping your grades up. I’m not happy about it, but that’s how it is. One of our Bulldogs is not here today because he decided he didn’t care enough about his athletic future to put the work in.” 

A few of Mason’s friends look awkward. Kleats shakes his head. “That’s not a winner. I am not in the business of coaching losers. So if any of you are losers, I want you to leave the field right now.” 

He points at the school, and a hush falls over the crowd. None of the quarterback hopefuls move. Thea swallows hard, thinking of her plummeting grades in Howitzer’s English class. She wasn’t in the danger zone yet, but if she didn’t do something she could be in serious trouble. Still, if that was what it took to play football, she could handle it. She’d figure something out. 

“All right, then.” Kleats claps his hands. “Line up at the end zone. We’re running sprints.” 

No one dares groan, but none of the players seem happy about it as they trudge to take their places on the line. Thea, on the other hand, is ecstatic. She knows she’s fast. Impressing the coach early would have his eyes on her for the rest of the tryout - though, admittedly, that was probably the case already. 

One by one, the players run the specified distance, and the assistant coach yells out their time. Thea’s heart sinks when Marty finishes with an impressive time of 3.7 seconds, to much cheering from his section of the crowd. She’d hoped he was all talk and no substance. 3.7 was Thea’s best time. 

She takes a deep breath as she lines up at the starting line, focusing all of her energy. Her body relaxes as her mind goes peacefully blank. It helped that she’d had a real breakfast that morning, thanks to her new celebrity at Pop’s. She trains her eyes on the finish, already picturing herself on the other side. 

“Go!” yells the coach, and Thea flies. The bleachers streak into a blur as she runs with her arms pumping, her feet barely touching the ground. The whole field goes quiet when the assistant coach yells out her time. 3.6! 

Thea doesn’t dare celebrate, but she can feel herself smiling proudly as she turns and trots back to the others. A few voices from the stands are cheering her on, mostly female, but they hush when Coach Kleats quickly moves the tryout along. His eyes land on Thea, and he gives her a respectful nod that makes hope swell in her chest. She’d impressed him. She knew it. 

The next twenty minutes are dedicated to gruelling obstacle courses, ladder drills, and more running. The coach is evidently trying to put them through hell to judge their endurance, and Thea’s secretly thrilled when some of the boys start falling behind. Every time, though, Thea and Marty’s times are nearly neck-in-neck. 

He’s not her only competition either - she keeps noticing the coach watching two of the burlier seniors with approval. When they switch to throwing drills, he looks particularly impressed - both of them have phenomenal arm strength and can throw fast and long. Marty sets a new record for distance, and then it’s Thea’s turn to throw. 

Thea knew she and Marty were the best athletes overall - they were consistently performing well across the board. But throwing fast and far relied on arm strength, and while Thea was strong, experienced, and smart, she couldn’t compare to the brute force of some of the guys. Nervously, she grips the football, leaving some space between her palm and the pebbled skin. Holding it close to her body, she keeps her back straight as she rears back and throws with all her might. 

The ball leaves her fingers perfectly and flies in a high spiral downfield. It soars forty-five yards across the ten-yard-line and bounces down gently onto the grass - the perfect place for another player to catch it as gently as a feather and score a winning touchdown. 

Kleats scribbles in his clipboard, murmuring a reluctant approval as a few people whoop from the stands. Once again, Thea had outperformed almost all of the boys. The assistant coach splits them up into pairs to do passing drills, and Thea’s relieved when she’s put with one of the seniors rather than Marty. She’s not scared of the guy - far from it - but she’s in no rush to spend any one-on-one time with him, especially when she had no doubt he would stoop to sabotage. 

A few of the onlookers begin to leave at dinnertime, but many continue to watch as Kleats keeps the players working. Thea’s throat and calves are burning by the time the tryout is almost done, her brow dripping sweat and her breath coming in heavy gasps. The last task is a quick scrimmage, and the assistant coach glances quickly at her before declaring Thea’s side shirts and the other skins. To her relief, the boys assigned to be her teammates don’t treat her any differently than they treat one another as they huddle up. 

They’re running a flag pattern when a player on the opposite team suddenly barrels out of nowhere and shoves her hard to the ground. A sharp pain shoots up her right knee as she lands hard, throwing out her hands to break her fall and scraping both palms. The full weight of the other boy suddenly lands roughly on Thea, pushing her down to the ground and smacking her chin into the earth. A knee drives hard into her spine, sending a sharp blossoming pain up her back. A few of the spectators cheer at her injury - a sparse minority, but enough. 

Thea grits her teeth, but refuses to make a sound. She’s been on the bottom of pile-ups before - not to mention the one or two rounds she sometimes had to go with the sole of her father’s motorcycle boot. There’s yelling out on the field, and when Thea finally gets to her feet and anxiously tries putting weight on her knee, she’s completely unsurprised to see it was Marty Mantle who had hit her. 

“You okay?” the boy who had offered her a hand asks. Thea’s knee takes her weight without complaint and she nods in relief, checking herself over and finding herself slightly bruised but otherwise unharmed. Marty’s complaining to Kleats - something about how women aren’t strong enough to play football - but for once, the coach isn’t having it. 

“Did that maneuver help your team at all, Mantle!?” he yells across the field, his face bright red and his eyes narrowed in fury. The assistant coach and the stands are silent, but Kleats’ bellowing voice probably would have carried regardless. 

Marty scoffs in reply, but Kleats quickly yells over him: 

“Was that maneuver in any way calculated for the good of your teammates, or was it a selfish, immature way of getting out your grudges?” 

Marty opens his mouth, seems to think better of whatever he was going to say, and then closes it. But Kleats isn’t done. 

“A good quarterback doesn’t let emotions or prejudice get the best of him!” he yells. “A good quarterback is a leader, not a clown! I don’t care how good you are, Mantle, if you play football you need to work as a team. And this isn’t the first time you’ve shown your true colours.” 

Kleats tosses his clipboard on the ground, and Thea watches in awe of his fury. “You have a black mark on your record already, and this is telling me it’s a sportsmanship issue. I was very generously giving you a second chance, but I can tell you right now I have no interest in having you on my team. Get off the field.” 

A murmur rises from the crowd and the other players. Thea steals a glance at the boy closest to her, who looks quickly at her and then away. The boy who had helped her shifts from foot to foot, looking at the ground, the sky, the trees, anywhere but the scene in front of them. 

“Coach-” Marty protests, annoyed, but Kleats’ voice booms out, silencing him. 

“Get off the field right now.” 

There’s complete silence as Marty finally backs down and walks away. Thea’s head is swimming, still in shock from the scene in front of her as she tries to calculate quickly at the same time. She knew she had played the best, and with Marty out of the running, she was a shoo-in. But the question remained as to whether or not Kleats would let his own prejudices tamper the results of the tryout. 

The coach looks at the rest of them, making eye contact with each player in turn. Thea tries to interpret his gaze, but his expression when he looks at her is unreadable. “Results will be posted on Monday,” he says finally, before turning away. Thea’s heart thumps hard and fast against her ribs. “You’re all dismissed.” 

* * *

“Hey!” Thea calls when she sees Freddie loitering in the hall outside the girls’ change room. Freddie perks up at her voice, making a beeline for the other girl. 

“Are you okay!? God, I hate him!” Freddie’s almost vibrating with serious anger, her hands curled into fists. Small as Freddie was, Thea would have put money on her in a fight. “Hank had to hold me back from running onto the field!” 

Thea tries and fails to hide a smile, uncharacteristically touched. “I think I did well,” she confesses, her fingers awkwardly flying to her sweaty hair to tuck it behind her ear. 

“Are you kidding? You showed all of them! You were easily the best, all-around. Coach has to pick you!” Freddie's enthusiasm doesn't let up as they walk together down the front steps of the school, headed for the parking lot. "I thought Marty's stupid eyes were going to fall out of his head when you beat his time!” She hushes, looking up at Thea with true admiration. “You’re incredible.”

It’s rare that Thea feels truly special - even rarer that she feels flustered or moved by someone else’s words. But she feels her chest swell at Freddie’s words, as though she believed them for the first time in her life. Unwilling to give in to her emotions, she gives Freddie’s arm a quick shove and herds her toward the cars with an arm slung casually around her shoulders. 

“What do you say about dinner at Pop’s?” she asks, slapping Freddie playfully on the back. “I need some onion rings after that.” 

“You got it.” Freddie’s toothy grin lasts all the way to their parking spot. Thea straddles her motorbike easily and pats the seat behind her, offering Freddie her helmet. 

“Hop on.” 

“Um…” Freddie’s smile suddenly disappears. “You know what… I completely forgot, I promised my mom I’d be home for dinner.” 

Thea’s grin fades. Freddie keeps stumbling through an excuse, staring at the ground as though suddenly fascinated by the lines on the parking lot. 

“I’m sorry, I forgot, I have this… um…. family thing..” 

“Oh,” Thea doesn’t try to hide her disappointment, and Freddie suddenly looks up, chewing her lip nervously and twirling the hair next to her ear. 

“Why don’t I go home and see if I can get out of it, and I’ll meet you there?” she offers. 

“Well if you don’t want to, don’t bother.” Thea snipes. The comment stings her pride, for reasons that she can’t really place. It’s obvious Freddie doesn’t want to get on her bike, and Thea begrudgingly has to admit she can’t help but take it personally. It should be a non-issue, only it serves more than anything to remind her of how different their home lives are. 

Freddie’s face falls, and Thea looks away across the field. Her anger and shame is all mixed up in her head, and she isn’t sure what emotion she’s feeling. 

“Forget it,” she says. 

A week ago, Freddie’s reluctance wouldn’t have surprised her in the slightest - Thea had assumed at first glance that she was sheltered, uptight, a bit of a princess who was used to riding in the lap of luxury. But Freddie had seemed so much more laid back than that, and Thea had foolishly assumed she would be cool about it. 

“I do want to,” Freddie replies. She looks up at Thea with her brown eyes huge and hurt. “I promise, I would love to eat dinner with you. I just have to meet you there.” 

One look into those eyes and Thea folds like a cheap suit. Her shoulders sag, and she exhales out all of her anger. “I’m not mad,” she mumbles, kicking at her pedals. “I can meet you there, no problem.” 

“Okay.” Freddie seems uncertain as she reaches for the door of her truck, her eyes never leaving Thea and her bike, but Thea had been telling the truth. It’s herself she’s mad at now - for being so sensitive about living in the stupid trailer park. It was bad enough that she had lied to Freddie about living on this side of the tracks, that her penchant for horror movies had made her blurt out _E_ __l_ m street _ . 

It was a stupid lie, but she’d had to be strategic. If the coach and her peers at school had got wind of her living situation before the tryouts, it could stack them against her when they were making the team. And it couldn’t hurt to let Freddie believe she had a normal house and a normal family - the thrum of longing in her heart had wanted her new friend to believe that, just for awhile. 

“I’ll call you at Pop’s. There’s a payphone there.” Freddie still hesitates, one hand on the door handle, her truck keys dangling from her hand. “Is that okay?” 

“Deal,” Thea says firmly, buckling her helmet on and revving her engine. Her back was beginning to ache - she could already tell she was going to have a killer bruise. “See you later.” 

She kicks her feet up and speeds away from the high school, the roar of the engine drowning out the pounding of her heart. 


	6. Chapter 6

"I don't get it," Thea says, taking a bite of her third hamburger. She’d been halfway through her second when Freddie had rushed into Pop’s and slid into the seat across from her, asking the waitress for her usual. Thea will never admit how her heart had relaxed at the sight, how her food suddenly tastes better now that Freddie was acting as though nothing had changed between them since the parking lot. Freddie’s stirring her peanut butter milkshake with a french fry now, and it already feels right - the two of them in this booth, like a routine, like old friends. "Hiram hates both of us, probably more than anyone else in this town. And you want to show up at his party after tomorrow's game?" 

Freddie lifts the dripping french fry out of the glass and takes a large bite. "He has a huge house. It's not like we'll run into him."

"Unless he goes out of his way to run into us," Thea points out, watching as Freddie slides the tomatoes off her burger with a grimace. "Don't tell me there's nothing else to do in this podunk town on a Friday night."

Freddie's blush tells her exactly that. "Well, not  _ nothing _ . We have an arcade and a drive-in and a roller rink and all that.” She lifts the burger to her mouth and shrugs. “Friday night house parties are just kind of what we do."

Thea's eyebrows have gone up. "This town sounds way more fun than mine. The only arcade we had in Midvale was at the mall. And we had movie theatres, but no drive-in."

"Drive-in is where everyone hangs out Saturday night." Freddie shrugs. "I guess we kind of stick to a routine around here." 

"Quaint." Thea’s starting to get it: Football games, party, drive-in, school. These kids lived like characters in an 80s movie. She leans forward. "Would you show me around?" 

"Show you around?" Freddie pretends to think about it. Thea nudges her playfully under the table with her foot. 

"Come on," she pretends to wheedle. "Clearly you know this town better than anyone, and I’m new. Show me where it all goes down."

"The  _ whole _ town? You sure you have that long?” Freddie laughs, and though the joke is at her own expense, Thea can tell from her voice she loves her town, and is proud of it. “Doing the whole tour takes about fifteen minutes." 

“Go on,” persuades Thea, nudging Freddie with her foot again. “You can make it the most exciting fifteen minutes of my life.” 

* * *

To her credit, Freddie gives a hell of a good tour. Thea watches her as much as the scenery as she drives through the town, the late-afternoon sun casting an auburn halo on her brown hair as she points out this landmark or that one, laughing as she recalls some story about herself and her friends. She has her hair tugged back into a scruffy ponytail, the breeze from the open windows tossing the loose ringlets at each ear back from her face. 

Freddie handles the truck with ease despite its size, steering with one hand and letting the other arm dangle out the window into the air. The sky above them is bright blue and dotted with fluffy clouds, and when Thea gazes up at it through the sun-warmed glass she feels loose and free, untethered from earth and reality. 

Riverdale is small, but there’s so much quaint Americana packed into the bustling main street and surrounding sprawl that Thea has to turn her head quickly back and forth as Freddie drives to take it all in. Back home there was nothing to see - even the nicer parts of Midvale were nondescript suburbs, supplied in a perfunctory way with the essentials: a McDonalds, the grey box of a movie theatre, a chain video rental place. They had a huge new mall and a metropolitan downtown with a few nightclubs and office buildings, and that was it. 

Here, though, everything is unique and brightly coloured, with more mom-and-pop shops than chain stores. The basics are there: a church (Thea shudders), a graveyard, a small hospital, a police station that looks like it hasn’t been updated since the nineteen-fifties. But it’s the unusual that catches Thea’s eye - a bowling alley done in midcentury style, a real drive-in movie theatre, a roller rink, a teen dance club, a used car lot that seems to be selling only vintage automobiles. 

At one point it seems impossible that the little town can fit it all - they pass a rickety baseball stadium on the way to the beach, and Thea has to wonder how much more a town with such a small population needs - they’d also miraculously passed signs for a Mal-Mart, a zoo, a public pool, a train station, and a yacht club. 

Somehow Freddie has a story to go with everything. Pickens Park was where she had thrown her first baseball, Thrill Hill was where she had raced her friends on her sled every winter. She had once led a protest outside City Hall to save the park from being bulldozed, and remembers fondly the building of the Token Arcade in the 1980s and the re-opening of the already ancient-looking Bijou Movie Theatre. Thea tenses when she approaches the Southside, but Freddie rattles over the tracks without a moment’s regard for the metaphor to point out Fox Forest, the also oddly-slasher-movie-named Crystal Lake, and the soup kitchen where she and her friends volunteered during the holidays. 

“And there’s Sunnyside, the trailer park,” she says simply, pulling a U-turn and steering the truck back toward the tracks. “And the Whyte Wyrm, but I wouldn’t go near there any later at night than this. There’s lots of gang stuff that goes on.” 

_ You mean the gang that just welcomed my father back as leader with open arms?  _ Thea wants to ask, but keeps her mouth shut. She hopes against hope that Freddie won’t remember to ask where she lives, but Freddie seems to have the uncanny ability to read minds. 

“Where is your house, by the way?” she asks immediately, once they’re back on the Northside and coasting through quiet suburbs again. “You never told me.” 

Thea swallows hard, but steels her nerves. There was no use lying, and she’d rather know now than later if Freddie had a problem with her upbringing. Still, she can feel her fingers flying up anxiously to tuck her hair behind her ear, and she avoids Freddie’s eyes when she replies: 

“I, uh- I was wrong about the street. I live in Sunnyside.” She glances at Freddie through her bangs, and then away again. “The trailer park.” 

To her surprise, Freddie’s face doesn’t change, her voice calm as she replies “Oh,” like it’s no big deal. “Cool.” 

“Cool?” Thea repeats. She feels stupid for being so anxious, but her nerves are suddenly on fire. She’s all-too-conscious that Freddie’s trying to be tactful, and the knowledge flares her embarrassment into a stubborn snarkiness. “I wouldn’t call it  _ cool _ ,” she snaps. 

Freddie shrugs diplomatically. “I mean, you’ve got a pool.” 

Thea can’t help but loosen her shoulders as she laughs out loud, unexpectedly struck by Freddie’s fairness. “That pool! That’s disgusting! What a trade-off!” 

Freddie giggles, and Thea finally relaxes into the seat. 

“Whatever,” she says, combing her bangs down over her face and then pushing them back to the sides. “I guess I was kinda worried you’d judge me.” She looks quickly out the window so she won’t have to look Freddie in the eye. 

“Dude, why would I judge you? Not everyone can afford a nice big house in the suburbs. Trust me, I know I’m lucky. And a lot of people in this town are a lot luckier than me.” Freddie’s quiet for a moment, and Thea glances back at her. “If I were mayor, that’s the first thing I’d change. More affordable housing. The disparity on both sides of downtown is pretty severe.” 

Thea blinks, surprised at the knowledgeable reply. “Are you planning on being mayor?” 

Freddie grins at her, a big spunky grin full of teeth. “Why not?” She laughs at Thea’s reaction. “Besides, there’s nothing wrong with living there. It’s just an address. Just because you live in a trailer, doesn’t mean you’re a criminal.” 

Thea’s smile fades, remembering her father’s proclamation that she’d be working for his gang as soon as she got settled in school. “Right…” 

“Hey, it’s contest hour!” Freddie turns up the radio, breezing past the awkward moment like it hadn’t happened. “I don’t usually get to listen, because it’s during dinner.” 

Thea turns her attention to the voice coming out of the staticy set, pushing down the unpleasant memory. Freddie’s radio has clearly been taken from another vehicle and frankensteined into this one, but it seems to be in good working order, even if there are scratches all over the face. The dials are gummy with fingerprints, and someone’s added an “11” in marker on the 10-notch volume control. 

_ “You’re listening to WRIV, Riverdale’s rock station. We’re going to play a one-second clip of a song just now, and if you recognize it, phone in and you could win tickets to the Pearl Jam concert at the Riverdale Sports Arena. Caller number seven. Good luck!”  _

The millisecond of instrumental that follows sounds like nonsense to Thea, but Freddie suddenly yells at the top of her lungs. “FUCK! I know this one! Where’s a phone!?” 

“Um-” Thea’s suddenly jerked back in her seat as Freddie stomps on the gas, the truck lurching forward and squealing down the street in a cloud of exhaust. She roars around a corner and screeches to an abrupt halt next to the bank, half on the curb and half on the street. Freddie throws the door open and sprints to a pay phone, plugging in a quarter and punching in a number from memory. With a dubious glance at the fire hydrant they’re parked next to, Thea slowly unbuckles her seatbelt and follows her out. 

“It’s ringing, it’s ringing!” Freddie says when Thea’s within earshot, motioning her closer and turning the handset so they can both hear. Thea obediently bends down and puts her ear next to the phone. Freddie gasps when a male voice speaks in their ear. 

“Hello? WRIV.” 

Freddie shrieks. “Hi!” 

“Hey. Can I ask who’s calling?” 

“It’s Freddie Andrews and Thea Jones!,” Freddie announces, a huge grin on her face, despite Thea shaking her head when she hears her name. 

“Freddie Andrews and Thea Jones, you are caller number seven. If you can tell us-”

“IT’S FAITH BY GEORGE MICHEAL!” Freddie yells, loud enough that Thea winces and ducks away from the phone. Freddie’s enthusiasm is so infectious, though, that she has to put her head back next to the receiver to hear the outcome. 

“That…. is….” The radio jockey’s making a big show of checking the answer, while Freddie’s sneakered foot bounces anxiously on top of Thea’s, pressing down hard enough to hurt. “Correct! Congratulations, you’ve just won two tickets to see Pearl Jam at the Riverdale Sports arena on October fifteenth!” 

“YES!” Freddie cheers and punches the air. “YES! YES! YES! THANK YOU!” 

She almost hangs up the phone then and there, but then suddenly yanks it back to her ear before it can touch the cradle. 

“Freddie Andrews,” she dictates as Thea watches, amazed, “two-zero-three-seven elm street, Riverdale, USA, yep, that’s the one! My phone number is two one four, one two one, one-four-four. Thank you!” 

She’s grinning ear to ear when she hangs up, her eyes glowing and trained on Thea. “SHIT!” yells Freddie abruptly, throwing both hands up for a double high-five, which Thea meets without question. “I never get through! I never get through, because I figure Hiram Lodge is tying up the line on his car phone. But we won!” She hops up and down into an impromptu cheer. “We won, we won, we won!” 

She plows into Thea for a hug, and for someone so small, Freddie’s full body weight almost knocks her flat over. “You must be lucky or something! Woohoo! Let’s go to the beach!” 

In the next instant, Freddie’s released her and is sprinting back across the road toward her truck at top speed, her arms raised in victory. Thea stares after her with her cheeks hurting, and realizes belatedly that she can’t stop smiling even when she tries. 

* * *

“Ta-da!” Freddie hops out of the truck and spreads her arms wide. “The beach! Now you’ve seen it all. Coast to coast, so to speak.” 

Thea steps quietly down from the truck and stands in the sand, staring out at the calming waves and the long stretch of white beach. It’s almost too good to be true. The snack stands are boarded up for the fall, but it’s all too easy to imagine what it must look like when it’s bustling. Riverdale really did have everything. 

Freddie heaves a huge sigh. “I miss the summer.” 

“It’s kind of nice with no people around,” Thea points out, her gaze trained on the horizon. The blue sky has gone overcast, but the lowering sun shines through the clouds in gold. It makes the beach look sleepy and surreal - the rays stretch long and amber across the sand. Freddie’s face is coloured with it, and her hair is on fire. 

Freddie perks up again. “It is, isn’t it? Come on, let’s go for a walk.” 

They pass a line of boarded-up surf shacks and a scattering of picnic tables, carrying their shoes. Freddie stops every so often to pick up a shell or a piece of sea glass, offering the latter to Thea once, almost shyly. Thea slips it in her pocket and runs her thumb along the smooth edge, rewarded with a smile from her new friend that could put the golden light to shame. 

They’re just about to turn back when Thea feels a drop hit her forehead. Freddie stretches her arms out to the sky, palms of her hands turned up, and the rain begins to fall harder. Thea’s unsure of whether they’re going to stand out in the rain or not until a crack of lightning splits the sky, followed by a rumble of far-off thunder. Freddie grabs Thea’s wrist with her free hand. 

“Run!” she yelps, and leads the way across the dunes back toward the parking lot, lightning forking the sky above them. They make it to the truck just in time - no sooner has Thea slammed the door and cranked her window up than the heavens open and rain begins to pour down in sheets, blowing across the sand and drumming furiously against the metal roof of the truck. Clouds have moved in across the whole sky, now, and the sun has disappeared. Freddie’s eyes are huge and surprised, but she’s grinning. 

“Holy shit,” says Thea, watching the rain descend so thick and fast it resembles a mist, or a pane of glass. 

“Damn,” says Freddie. “I thought we were going to see a nice sunset.” 

“This is better,” replies Thea. She had always been partial to the rain - sitting here and watching it fall transports her back to her childhood, when she still had the patience to watch things with wonder. They sit in silence for a moment before Freddie turns the ignition so they can hear the radio, and the sounds of the WRIV rock station fill the cab. With the windows closed, the air is thick and stuffy, but not uncomfortably so - she can hear Freddie’s breathing, smell the faint strawberry scent of her shampoo, the world outside seeming as dense and hallucinatory as if they were enclosed in a snowglobe. 

“There’s one place I haven’t shown you!” Freddie’s voice cuts through the quiet, though they can still hear the drumbeat of rain on the roof above the music. Though it’s still pouring, the thunder and lightning have slowed. “Do you mind?” 

Thea shakes her head, gesturing to the road with her hand. “Go for it.” 

Freddie has to turn the headlights on when they hit the main road, the windshield wipers keeping time to the beat of the song as the truck sails along the coast. When they reach the fork that leads back to the centre of town Thea expects Freddie to turn, but instead she keeps driving past it, turning instead onto a steep dirt road that hadn’t been visible from the main street. 

Thea catches a flash of a street sign in the headlights - she has enough time to read  _ MILLER’S POINT _ before it’s swallowed by the dark trees surrounding the path. The road is narrow, and branches and wet leaves slap occasionally at the windows of the car as they climb the embankment, slithering against the glass like eels. 

At the top of the hill the road gets steepest, and the truck’s engine starts to whine as Freddie tries to coax it through the wet mud. “Come on,” she moans, patting the dashboard as she adjusts the clutch, Thea nervously holding onto the edges of her seat as rain and wind buffet the cab. “Come  _ on _ , Oscar-” 

With a roar the truck overcomes the slippery patch, and then they’re up and through the trees, coming upon a small tidy clearing at the crest of a hill. Freddie stops and parks before a low wooden fence, and Thea catches sight of a glimmer of light down at the bottom of the incline. She leans forward to see better through the rain. “Is that-?” 

“The whole town,” Freddie replies. “You can see all of it from up here.” 

“Where are we?” Thea asks. They’re not up  _ that  _ high, but it’s admittedly impressive to look down and see everything they’d just passed laid out before them. She can see houses and the church steeple and the white rectangles of trailers. 

“Miller’s Point.” Freddie replies. Looking left to right, Thea can tell the dirt of the clearing is well-worn by tire tracks, forming a row of parking spaces overlooking the town. “It’s kind of a private place. Kids come up here on Fridays and Saturdays to- y’know.” She blushes and grins at once. “I’m sure you had one in Midvale.” 

“We did,” Thea admits. She reaches out and runs her fingers across the scarred dashboard, avoiding Freddie’s eyes. “I guess you come up here with Hank.” 

“I’ve been here a couple of times,” Freddie replies, just as evasively. Thea turns and considers her friend in the meagre light from the headlights. 

She’d never admit it, but she had tentatively put feelers out on the matter of Thea and Hank with the douchey-looking guys in one of her classes, assuming that they’d be the first ones to tell it to her straight. Paranoid, she’d omitted Freddie entirely from the question and had only asked who, if anyone, Hank was seeing, eventually nudging the subject around to Hank’s girlfriend and her reputation. 

Freddie, she learned, was a _flirt_ \- a term she’d assumed just mean _slut_ in Riverdale-ese until it had been clarified for her that tease was a more appropriate description. Freddie apparently had a reputation for flirting with every guy with a pulse, even while taken, but the fun of the chase seemed to be it for her. She’d let them take her out, but move on long before they could get close to home base. 

“It’s no wonder, though,” one of the boys had said. “With her parents-” 

But the bell had rung at that moment, and Thea had never found out what it was about Freddie’s parents that was so significant. 

Looking at the girl now, though, she can understand why the guys put up with it. Freddie was fun, and cute, and spontaneous. Thea had more fun with her in the past few hours than she’d had in three years at her old school. Thea would gladly follow her off the ends of the earth for no reward if she were one of the boys lucky enough to catch Freddie’s eye. 

“Hank and I, we’re not-” Freddie says suddenly, and then stops herself. She doesn’t look at Thea, but nervously combs a hand through her hair, her eyes riveted on a point outside the front windshield. Thea tries not to stare at her, but it’s hard. Freddie wets her upper lip and tries again. “We’re not as perfect as everyone thinks we are.” 

Thea waits for her to finish, and when Freddie says nothing else, nudges her with her knee. “Trouble in paradise?” 

“Why does everyone say that?” A little smile has curled up on Freddie’s lips. “We look good together, I know it. I’m not being pompous, everyone tells us that. But it’s like-” She heaves a sigh. “You know how you’re not supposed to get everything you want because you’ll realize it actually sucks? I’ve had a crush on Hank for like, my whole life. I always thought we were supposed to end up together.” She picks at a stray thread on the seat. “Sometimes it’s great. But sometimes it’s like - we talk to each other, but we don’t listen.” 

Thea nods patiently, trying to keep the simmering feeling in her stomach at bay. She can’t describe why - refuses to - but Freddie’s confession is making her palms sweat and her skin prickle. Freddie sighs, oblivious, and pushes her hair back. 

“Hank - he’s Mister Popular, right? Cheer captain, all that. Sometimes I feel like I’m just a part of the puzzle. That I’m just the perfect girlfriend because it’s a box he’s checking off. He has his whole life planned out, you know? I don’t ever plan past the weekend. I don’t have a plan.” 

She looks so morose that Thea can’t help but try to make her laugh. “Sure you have a plan.” She nudges Freddie’s leg again, their knees bumping together. “You’re gonna be mayor.” 

“Right.” Freddie grins, turning to face her. “And you’ll be… my official food taster. In case someone tries to poison me.” 

Thea scoffs, though secretly pleased she’d made Freddie smile. “Who’d poison the mayor of a town with five hundred people?” 

“Stranger things have happened.” Freddie stretches. “Whatever. Just don’t think Hank and I are as great we look.” 

They fall into a comfortable silence, then, the radio playing a Billy Idol song that Thea knows. She glances at Freddie and is struck by the urge to make her laugh again, to impress her somehow. She gulps and tries to fight the urge back, but it doesn’t go. 

“You named your truck,” Thea says suddenly, raising her voice slightly to be heard over the rain. 

Freddie looks confused. “What?” 

“When we got stuck back there. You called it Oscar.” 

“Oh. I just meant that - my brother Oscar was fixing this truck up. So if we got stuck, it was his fault.” Freddie laughs but there’s something forced in it, something sad that Thea can’t place. 

“Was?” Thea questions, but Freddie acts like she doesn’t hear. Instead she flips the sunvisor down on the driver’s side and unpins a photo - a slightly younger Freddie with a handsome male teenager her spitting image, both of them in ball caps and gloves. 

“That’s sweet,” muses Thea, examining it. “Most brothers would have pin-up girls or something. Go Oscar. Did he put the radio in?” 

She glances up in time to see hot tears running down Freddie’s cheeks, and something jolts inside her like she’d just missed a step on a steep staircase. These are serious tears - hard and silent and unyielding, soaking the collar of her plaid shirt. Thea gapes for a moment like a fish out of water, and then grabs uselessly at a wrinkled fast food napkin shoved into the nearest cupholder, offering it to her crying friend. Freddie takes the napkin, but only crumples it in her fist and doesn’t use it. Thea thinks stupidly that she must be crying over Hank until Freddie sniffs loud, her voice wobbly but hard as glass when she finally speaks. 

“There is no Oscar, Thea.” 

Thea blinks, dumbfounded. She glances again at the photo in her hand. “What? Your brother -” 

Freddie stares hard out the front windshield, fighting back tears. “My brother Oscar died six months ago. He’s dead.” 

That jolt again, an unpleasant drop, only this time the bottom falls out of Thea’s stomach and keeps falling. Her blood runs cold. 

“Fuck,” whispers Thea. “What- what happened?” Freddie doesn’t answer and she feels a swoop of guilt for the question. “I’m so sorry,” she adds belatedly. “You don’t have to-” 

“Car crash,” Freddie finally answers, cutting her off. “It was my fault.” 

_ DO YOU DREAM OF AN ICE COLD ROOT BEER? _ the radio commercial suddenly bellows, and Freddie reaches out quickly and snaps it off, leaving the two of them alone with the pouring rain. 

“He worked - used to work - at the liquor store in town, right?” Her voice is low under the rain, the cadence of a campfire ghost story, but Thea never once doubts the sincerity or the pain in it. “He worked late and I was supposed to have the car home by eleven. I was  _ supposed _ to have the car home by eleven, so my dad could pick him up, or I could have gone and picked him up, either one. But the truck wasn’t - it was at the shop, so we were sharing my dad’s car, all three of us. And I promised I’d be home by eleven when Oscar got off so he could have a ride home.” 

Thea nods, staring at her. She’s following, but she wants Freddie to take her time. 

“I didn’t get back until after midnight and I guess my dad was furious because Oscar didn’t have a way to get home. But Oscar told him it was fine, and his coworker would give him a lift. And I don’t - I don’t even remember what we were doing that I didn’t have the car home, we were just drinking and being stupid, driving around, you know. I told my dad we were studying. But his co-worker had - had a motorbike and they c-crashed-”

Freddie’s shaking, and Thea scooches closer to her on the bench seat, trying to warm her with her proximity. It doesn’t make a difference - there’s no earthly cure for the cold she’s feeling. 

“I got home and he was already dead. He died while I was out drinking and being  _ stupid- _ ” 

Her voice cracks and Freddie folds forward, resting her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands. Thea reaches to touch her shoulder but only hovers uselessly, eventually moving her hand quietly back to the seat as she watches Freddie cry into her palms. 

“They said he died on impact, but how do they know?” She turns to Thea with a pained expression, her eyes pleading and wet with tears. “They say that, but how do they know he wasn’t just - wasn’t lying there in the road for-” Her voice breaks, and she looks abruptly away. 

“Well, if -” Thea begins tentatively, but shuts herself up. The last thing Freddie needed was to ponder the details of her brother’s final moments - it seemed from the look on her face that she’d spent enough time on that already. 

“His co-worker was fine. The guy who’s bike it was. He broke his wrist, and that’s all. Not even his whole arm, his  _ wrist  _ \- and Oscar’s _ dead.  _ He’s  _ dead  _ and I miss him so fucking much and my parents - it’s ruined them. You should see them, they act like zombies, and me -” Her voice hitches and she starts sobbing again. “-it’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault-” 

“It is my fault, because if I’d had the car home in time he wouldn’t have got on that bike, do you see? It is my fault, and now he’s just - he’s just gone. He’s gone and I’ll never see him again and he’ll never get his scholarship or get married and we’ll never finish the truck because he’s -” 

“Gone,” Thea finishes for her, and Freddie nods helplessly, turning her face up to Thea’s. She looks so open, so honest, so hurt, that Thea’s heart folds up inside her like a crumpled scrap of paper. 

Thea’s not good with words - never has been, never will be. She doesn’t have the means to comfort the girl next to her. But she knows what it’s like to lose someone you love, and she inches her hand imperceptibly closer to Freddie’s on the leather seat until their pinkies are barely touching, and she leaves her hand there. Freddie draws in a deep breath and looks away, out to where the rain is running in lazy streams down her window, and they sit there in the storm for a second that feels like an hour, hands barely touching, listening to the rain. 

“It’s not fair,” whispers Freddie, to Thea or to herself or to the universe, Thea isn’t sure. “It’s not  _ fair, _ it’s not  _ fair. _ ” 

“I know,” replies Thea, breathless as Freddie’s pinky finger crosses hers, hooking around her her ring finger and holding tight. “But it’s not your fault.” 

Freddie looks up at Thea again, her face wet with tears and glowing with the damp. The space in the cab of the truck seems to have gotten five times smaller between them, shrinking until their faces are separated by no more than a very negotiable foot of air. Thea’s heart begins to jackhammer mercilessly, and she feels the way she usually does after smoking weed - dreamy and uninhibited, Freddie’s face too close and too pale and her mind reeling and reeling and still staying blank. 

Only she’s sober. She’s sober, and Freddie’s brother is dead and if there were ever a right time to feel these things - which there isn’t - it’s not now, not with Freddie crying right next to her while Thea just sat and willed something to happen that shouldn’t happen, couldn't happen, that would never happen. Thea’s fingers shake and she combs her free hand through the loose grooves on the upholstery, hating herself for her thoughts, only Freddie keeps staring at her, doesn’t turn away. 

Thea’s knee touches Freddie’s again, so she must be leaning toward her involuntarily. She notices because the place where their skin touches suddenly burns, hot and prickly like that’s all she can feel. Freddie seems to come into herself and finally dabs at her eyes with the wrinkled napkin, turning back to the front window and breaking Thea’s gaze. Thea lets out a deep breath, trying to slow her racing heart. 

_ I’m sorry about Oscar _ , she thinks to say and then Freddie turns her head and kisses her. 

Her kiss tastes like cherry and lip gloss and milkshake - it lasts a second, and then Freddie pulls back, taking her shampoo smell with her and her hand brushes soft over Thea’s when she pulls it away. Thea just stares at her, terrified and not quite sure that it was real, her eyes wide and a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach. Freddie looks back at her, her own eyes bright and brown and unreadable, her face soft and still tear-streaked and as honest as it had been when she was talking about her brother. 

No, Thea thinks faintly, no, no, no, but Freddie’s pull is like a magnet, her entire universe shifting to accommodate her. She leans, and Freddie leans, and Thea kisses her back and Freddie does more than return it - she reaches out and hooks an arm around Thea’s neck, her fingers winding in her hair and the rain drumming hard against the metal roof as Freddie pulls her in. 

They kiss, and Thea’s senses are flooded with heat. _ This isn’t happening, _ she thinks, and then  _ this can’t be happening. _ But then Freddie’s other arm is around her, and her thumb is tracing the pulse point on Thea’s neck, and she’s turned her body toward Thea so that their thighs are touching and their knees overlap. When they finally break apart, she’s shifted her balance enough that she’s halfway to Thea’s lap. 

“What was that?” Thea manages, pushing gently on Freddie’s shoulder to keep them apart. 

Freddie gulps and wipes her tears. “I was telling you about my brother.” 

“You know what I mean.” 

Freddie swallows hard and runs her tongue along her bottom lip, quickly settling back in her seat and turning to face the front windshield. “I’m not-” 

Thea’s voice shakes. “Yeah, and neither am I.” 

“So it’s nothing,” says Freddie in a high voice, glancing back at Thea with pleading eyes. 

Thea just stares at her, nodding slowly. Freddie looks like she’s fighting some internal argument before she stammers: 

“But-” 

“But what?” Thea asks harshly.

“What if I don’t want it to be nothing?” 

Thea stares at her, contemplates flinging the truck door open for a moment and sprinting out into the rain, running down the steep hill and hitchhiking all the way back to the trailer park - all the way back to Midvale, if she could. She couldn’t do this.  _ Not again.  _

There are a million and one reasons she could have hurled in Freddie’s face. I don’t trust you. No one can know. You’re straight. You have a boyfriend. This is wrong. You’re upset and not thinking. You don’t know me. Just because I play football, doesn’t mean - 

“Then don’t talk about it,” she says instead, and her hands move of their own accord to find the waistband of Freddie’s blue jeans and settle there, fingers tucked into cloth. “I mean it. Not a word.” 

Freddie’s hair tickles Thea’s shoulder as she nods, and Thea steadies herself with a deep breath before she lets her eyes fall shut. That’s all it takes, and then Freddie’s cherry-lip-gloss lips are brushing hers again, and Thea’s opening her mouth to let her through, and her body is burning like a building lit on fire and it’s too late to stop it. It was too late from the moment they drove up there together and parked in the rain. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> That thunder in your heart at night when you're kneeling in the dark,  
> it says you're never gonna leave her  
> But there's this angel in her eyes that tells such desperate lies  
> and all you want to do is believe her

**Friday**

“You _what?_ ” asks Hank loudly, drawing the curious gazes of a group of freshmen at a nearby picnic table. It’s lunch period on Friday, and the two of them are waiting for Alice, Hal, and Thea to join them at their usual spot. 

Freddie stabs a fork into her spinach salad, spearing a slice of egg and a craisin. She repeats herself. “I don’t think I want to go to Hiram’s party tonight.” 

“Freddie,” Hank replies patiently, as though Freddie had suffered a recent head injury and needed to be babied, “It’s the party after Mason’s last game as quarterback. It’s Friday night. Everyone is going to be there. We’re on the cheerleading squad. It’s practically _mandatory_ that we show up.” 

Something about his tone annoys Freddie. She tosses her fork down. “Look, Thea hasn’t seen most of the town yet. I told her I would show her around all the hangouts tonight.” 

Hank purses his lips, lines appearing on his forehead. "Don't you think you're taking this welcoming committee thing too far? I know you're all about school spirit, but you realize we haven't seen each other in a week?" 

Freddie glares at him. "Has it ever occurred to you that she's my friend?" 

"No?" Hank wrinkles his nose. “Why would you want to be friends with a charity case like that? I told you, my friends are your friends."

“She’s not a charity case, Hank.” Freddie tosses her hair over her shoulder and glances quickly behind her into the schoolyard. “And I invited her to eat lunch with us today, so stop talking about her like that.” 

“Okay, but I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that too.” Hank frowns as though the matter at hand is extremely serious. “I think we should start eating lunch with the cheerleading squad. I know Hal and Alice are your friends, but-” 

“But what?” Freddie snaps. 

Hank lifts his hands, playing innocent. “But I think they’d understand if you wanted to eat with someone different once in awhile, that’s all.” 

“You just don’t like my friends!” Freddie accuses him. 

“I do so.” 

“That is such a lie! You’ve never liked Alice. And did you or did you not call Hal a bedwetter in the third grade and make him cry?” 

“That was third grade! You’re crazy. And I didn’t say anything that wasn’t true.” Hank sighs, pretending to concede. “Look, all I know is that if the captain of the cheerleading squad doesn’t go to an afterparty, it’s a bad look. Same thing for who they eat lunch with.” 

“I’m not the captain, Hank,” Freddie replies slowly, through gritted teeth. “You are.” 

“The captain’s girlfriend too! It’s an unwritten rule.” 

“You always say that!” Freddie complains. “These rules aren’t real, Hank. Remember what Mr. Howitzer said?” Their English teacher had a habit of going on tirades in the middle of class. “When we get out into the real world, nothing we did in high school matters.” 

“Everything we do in high school matters, Freddie!” Hank looks at her like she has two heads. “That’s just a lie losers tell themselves so they don’t feel bad about being losers. If you’re popular and successful in high school, you go on to be popular and successful in real life! They’ve done studies! It’s science.” 

“Some science,” Freddie grumbles, but Hank isn’t done. 

“Have you forgotten that the stuff we do in high school is exactly what colleges are looking at when we start applying next fall? Our extracurriculars. Our reputations. Our grades. You don’t get into Ivy League on your good intentions.” 

Freddie stabs sourly at her spinach salad, resenting the fact that Hank could always twist his logic around to make a point. “No, you get in if you can pay your way like Hiram Lodge.”

Hank picks a green grape out of his lunch and pops it in his mouth. “I don’t understand what that guy has ever done to you, anyway. You have this weird grudge against him that no one else has.” 

Freddie drops her fork into her salad in shock. “What has he ever done to me? I’ve only been complaining about him the entire time we’ve been together!” 

“Yeah, and it’s getting tired,” replies Hank breezily. “So anytime you want to forgive and forget and show up to this party would be fine with me.” 

“Sorry we’re late.” Alice drops suddenly into the seat across from Freddie, a fresh hickey blossoming on her neck. She looks quickly between Hank and Freddie, registering the tension between them as Hal settles himself down at the end of the table. “Am I interrupting something?” 

“No-” Freddie begins, but Hank speaks over her. 

“Freddie doesn’t want to go to the party tonight for some unfathomable reason.” He combs his perfectly-tousled hair casually back with his fingers and pouts. “Talk some sense into her, Alice, please.” 

“I think it’s great that Freddie’s not going to the party,” replies Alice dryly. Freddie turns in her seat to flash her a grateful look. 

“You do?” Hank asks. Alice takes a big bite of her sandwich. 

“Yeah. Then she can finish our history diorama that’s due on Monday. I’m not taking another B because her produce expired.” 

“It was a B-plus,” Freddie argues, but seizes the excuse, turning to her boyfriend. “Honestly, she’s right, Hank. I forgot that I have to work on that.” 

“You have the entire weekend.” 

“Yeah, and knowing Freddie she’ll need the entire weekend.” Alice fixes her with a stern glare, but kicks her gently under the table to let her know she’s on her side. “I bet she hasn’t started it yet, have you?” 

“Guilty,” Freddie lies. She looks up from her lunch, distracted by the approach of a dark figure from across the football field. 

Thea is wearing another pair of black jeans despite the heat, though both knees are torn open and the pockets close with shiny silver zippers. She’s paired them with a black Iron Maiden shirt that hung down to mid-thigh, and she has the same choker around her neck that she’d been wearing the first day. Freddie scooches quickly away from her friends to make room, patting the seat next to her. She acts casual, but inwardly she’s thrilled. She hadn’t been sure Thea would accept her invitation after what had happened between them last night. 

“You absolutely cannot let your grades interfere with your social life,” Hank lectures Freddie, completely ignoring Thea as she sits down. “That’s like, a one-way ticket to unpopularity. Plus, you can get kicked off the cheerleading squad. Look what happened to Mason.” 

Alice’s eyes have turned to Thea, regarding her with suspicion. Thea looks just as mistrusting as she returns the gaze, her eyes flickering from Alice’s tangled reams of blonde hair to her Doc Martens. Hal jumps into the conversation, clearly having been waiting for an opportunity. 

“Apparently some boys are coaching Marcus to get his grades up before game day,” he speaks up, taking a crumbly bite of one of Mrs. Cooper’s famous chocolate-chip cookies. “They were talking about it in Auto Shop.” 

“It’ll never work,” says Freddie confidently. “Marcus Mason is dumb as a bag of bricks. Also, last time I beat him in baseball he called me a dyke.” 

Thea goes quiet at the word, her head suddenly rushing with a memory as she squeezes into the picnic table. She’d been called the same thing once, but not by a boy, not even by her father. She closes her eyes as she tries to push away the memory of someone who had the same musical voice as Freddie, the same light touch -

“How are you doing, Thea?” 

Thea blinks, startled to see Freddie looking directly at her. _How can she use that word after what we did last night?_ Thea wonders, her palms beginning to sweat. Sitting with the popular crowd was a mistake, she’d known it all along. “Good,” she manages to reply. 

“So you’re from Midvale?” Alice speaks up, sounding as though she already knows the answer. “How does Riverdale High shape up?” 

“It’s… small.” Thea replies, glancing at the other two boys at the table. Hank is almost annoyingly handsome up close, with olive skin and big brown eyes fringed with long, dark lashes. Muscular but slim, he has a perfect athletic build and wavy dark hair. The blond boy at the end of the table must be Alice’s boyfriend - he’s shorter and chubbier, but he has the broad shoulders of a real linebacker. 

“I’m Hank Gomez,” Freddie’s boyfriend speaks up, ruffling his hair in a way that’s probably supposed to look effortless. “You’ve already met Freddie, and this is Hal, and Alice.” He indicates the others with a lazy hand motion that implies it would be beneath him to point directly. “We were just talking about the party tonight. Hey, I’ve got a great idea.” He straightens himself up, his face glowing, his smouldering gaze intent on Thea. “Why don’t we make you the guest of honour? Since you’re new in town and all.” 

Thea flushes. “No thanks.” 

“No, I mean it.” Hank reaches out behind him and catches the arm of a bespectacled redhead passing by. “Penelope, this is Thea, the new girl.” He points her in Thea’s direction. Penelope looks thrilled at the attention, but wrinkles her nose at the sight of Thea’s shirt. “Don’t you think she should be the guest of honour at Hiram’s party tonight? Being new and all.”

“Ooh, that sounds good.” Penelope gives her a big smile full of braces. “After all, it’s not every day a girl tries out for the boys’ football team. Thea Jones could make history.” 

Hank pats Penelope’s arm. “You could set her up with a date, couldn’t you, Pen-?” 

“Thea, did you forget your lunch?” Freddie speaks up, running right over Hank’s next words. She pushes her Tupperware container in the brunette’s direction. “Why don’t you have some of my salad. Or we can take a walk to the vending machine. I could use some Doritos.” 

Penelope gasps. “Freddie, there’s a rule against carbs on game day, you know that. Proteins only.” 

“Thea Jones?” asks Alice. Maybe it’s Thea’s imagination, but there’s a note of cool interest in the blonde’s voice that she doesn’t like. In fact, she doesn’t like any of this attention - at all. 

“Sorry, I did forget my lunch.” Thea tries to shove away the bench she’s sitting on, forgets that it’s attached to the table, and almost flips backward and lands on her ass. She stands abruptly and almost steps on Freddie’s hand in her haste to get out. “I’m going to go.” 

Freddie stares uselessly after Thea as she all but sprints back toward the school. Then she whirls around to face her friends, a frown embedding itself so deep onto her lips that the frown lines threaten to stick. 

“You guys all suck!” she snaps, pointing to each of them in turn. “Suck, suck, suck!” 

“What the hell did _I_ do?” Hal protests. Freddie doesn’t listen - she’s already climbed off her seat and is running after Thea. 

“Is it just me, or is this becoming a pattern?” Hal asks Alice, watching her disappear. 

He glances at his girlfriend, whose mouth is set in a grim line. Alice had her own suspicions about what was going on between her friend and the new girl - but she hoped she was wrong. She stands up as well, pushing aside her lunch tray. “I’m going to check on her.” 

“But-” Hal protests unsuccessfully, his face falling as Alice stalks off across the grass. Penelope squeezes into Alice’s abandoned spot with a smile, wrapping her hands shyly around Hal’s arm. 

“Bring back the version of my girlfriend that hasn’t been brainwashed by aliens, please,” Hank is yelling after Alice. “What am I supposed to do?” he gripes, turning to Penelope. “Not have a date for the party? Not likely.” 

“Oh, you’ll figure something out,” says Penelope patiently, turning a beaming smile on Hal. “You always do.” 

Hank waves his hand as though the matter is already settled. “Well, anyway. I heard through the grapevine that Hiram bought a new boat, and he’s letting a select few people use it at tonight’s party. Including yours truly, of course.” He turns his gaze to Hal and sighs. “Hal, you know sweets are horrible for your teeth, don’t you? Of course, I don’t have to worry about that. I’ve never had a cavity. When I went to the dentist last week, he said I had the best teeth he’s ever seen. Probably in all of Riverdale.” 

Hal sighs and nibbles the rim of his cookie. If Alice didn't come back, it was going to be a long lunch period. 

* * *

Alice listens to the sound of her Doc Martens thumping against the empty hall as she combs the school for Freddie and her new friend. How the hell had they disappeared so soon? She was sure she’d seen them come in the back door. But now she was wasting her lunch period tramping around an empty school, and she wasn’t even sure what she was going to say when she found them. 

Of course, Alice never usually had trouble speaking her mind. Especially with Freddie. They’d been best friends since they were six years old, when they’d bonded over both being ostracized from the boys' baseball team. Rather than pout, they’d gathered up every girl in the neighbourhood and joined forces to slaughter them in a pick-up game. Their friendship was iron-clad - almost nothing could come between them. 

Except for, occasionally, Freddie chasing boys. 

Freddie and Alice had entirely different attitudes toward the opposite sex. Boys were terrified of Alice, a distinction that she actively encouraged, and her kind-of-sort-of-long term thing with Hal Cooper was relatively new to her. Freddie, on the other hand, was what her mother fondly described as _boy-crazy_. 

Back in fifth grade, when most girls their age were only just beginning to see boys as anything other than a nuisance, Freddie had already declared Eduardo Lopez her sort-of boyfriend. She was always chasing some head-over-heels ridiculous crush, and the inside of her notebooks were riddled with initials. She’d also stop at nothing to get a date - and more than once, Alice had had to rescue her from when she’d made two dates for the same dance. Alice also knew well that Freddie’s best way of rebelling against her conservative father involved taking some boy up to Miller’s point past curfew. 

Alice had learned to spot the signs of Freddie’s infatuation. Her friend didn’t exactly make it difficult - Freddie’s emotions were an open book. That was why Alice was so sure about this one: unless she was very, very much mistaken, Freddie had a crush. Not just a little one, either - a big, fat, blistering, heart-stopping, earthquake-level natural disaster of a crush. It was as easy to read all over her face as the Sunday issue of the Register. 

A crush - on Thea. 

Which ushered in problem number two. Or, three, rather, if you first wanted to count the virulent homophobia of their small town as number two. But what concerned Alice more was Thea’s last name. 

Jones was a common surname - probably something like the fourth or fifth most common in the United States. But Alice had been wondering for awhile now why the new girl’s name rang a bell, and sitting at lunch with her, it finally clicked. She’d overheard her father just last night talking about Forsythe Jones’ return to the Southside Serpents, and how his daughter was going to be grandfathered in as a member. 

Forsythia Jones. Still, maybe she was wrong. Maybe it was a coincidence. No one - not even the gang’s former leader - could be egotistical enough to name their daughter after a feminized version of their own name - right? 

Alice sighs, worrying. It was a small fucking town. 

Noticing the door to the art room hanging slightly ajar, Alice pushes it open. Bingo. Thea’s sitting on one of the tall counters with her arms folded like the world’s biggest toddler, and Freddie’s standing between her legs, talking to her. When she sees Alice she takes several steps back, putting a more appropriate distance in between them. Alice notes this and files it away for later. 

“What do you want, Goldilocks?” Thea snaps. No lost manners on her end. Alice puts her hands up to show surrender. 

“Just making sure everything’s okay. You left kind of abruptly,” Alice says, her gaze sliding to Thea and her dangling combat boots. Biker boots. Of course - she herself had seen the girl roaring in and out of the parking lot on her motorbike. How many people in this town that weren’t in their gang owned a bike like that? Alice’s stomach twists. _Oh, Freddie._

It was bad enough if Thea was Forsythe’s daughter, but Mr. and Mrs. Andrews had expressly forbidden their daughter to go anywhere near a motorbike in the wake of Oscar’s death. It was one of the very few rules that Freddie actually went out of her way to obey. And now she was standing here with the owner of one. This couldn’t end well. 

“It’s fine, Alice,” says Freddie, diffusing the tension. “We’re going to Pop’s. Do you want to come?” 

The scowl Thea sends in her direction says she’d better not. “Some other time,” Alice says, and checks her watch. “You’d better be fast. Fourth period starts in a few minutes.” 

“We’ll be fast.” 

A horrible thought strikes Alice like a thunderbolt. “You- you’re taking your truck, aren’t you?” she asks. 

Freddie gives her a funny look. “Of course we are.” 

Alice tries to shake the image of a motorcycle crash out of her mind. Living on the Southside and growing up in a biker gang meant she had no shortage of imagery to draw from. “Nothing. Have fun. I’ll see you at the game after school.” 

She lets the door of the art room bang shut behind her

* * *

“Do you have anyone to sit with for the game?” Freddie asks as she and Thea stand on the pitch before the football game. They’re hidden from the action by a row of tall bleachers, so she reaches out and squeezes Thea’s wrist with the hand not holding her blue-and-gold pom poms. “I know you didn’t hit it off with my friends at lunch, but I know a lot of other nice people who would have sat with you. Belinda's sports editor for the paper, and she’s really cool.” 

Thea shrugs, disinterested. “Don’t worry. I like to be close to the action. I want to study what’s going on, not socialize.” 

“This time next week it’ll be you,” Freddie proclaims confidently. 

Thea snorts and fidgets with her hair. “Whatever. I doubt it.” 

“I don’t.” 

Thea stares into her friend’s warm eyes, and the coldness around her heart melts like hot butter. She shakes her head and glances away. “What makes you so sure they’ll decide they want a girl on the team?” 

“I just believe in you, that’s all.” 

“What makes you believe in me?” 

But Freddie just smiles, pushing Thea gently on the arm, and Thea feels like maybe she’s answered the question with just that touch. 

“Wish me luck,” Freddie calls, turning to face Thea as she’s jogging away. “And I _dare_ you to watch these new cheers we made up and tell me cheerleading isn’t a real sport!” 

Thea watches her run off to join the other cheerleaders, inwardly wishing for a modicum of Freddie’s energy. She drags her feet up to an empty seat and relaxes onto the sun-warmed metal. It was a nice day for football - crisp and autumn, with lots of light and barely a breeze. Watching football was one of the few things that Thea truly enjoyed, and she was looking forward to this game. Maybe it could give her something to focus on other than her endless worries - about the outcome of tryouts, about her father’s gang, about her father himself, about Freddie Andrews and Miller’s Point. 

Mason is easy to pick out on the football field - he’s easily the burliest and stupidest on the team. Thea leans forward to watch him as he chugs from his water bottle and jogs up the field to receive a practice pass from curly-haired Harry Clayton. 

_Enjoy it while you can_ , she thinks, her eyes roving subconsciously to where the cheerleaders are stretching. Freddie’s balanced on one leg to stretch her thigh, chatting with pigtailed Penelope. _Next week it’ll be me._

Relaxing onto the bleachers, she smiles up at the sunny sky above them, surprised at her own confidence. 

Maybe there was something to this school spirit schtick after all. 

* * *

By the end of the game, Thea’s new school has clinched a 13-7 victory over the Cross Hill Cobras, and she’s spent almost as much time studying her team’s plays as she has been studying Freddie’s cheerleading moves. 

But the real treat comes after Thea’s waited patiently outside the girls’ locker room with a row of other boyfriends, Hank Gomez among them, who gives up long before her and sashays off with Penelope in the direction of the parking lot. Only then does Freddie come bursting out the changeroom doors in a tank-top and shorts, her hair wet and slicked back from the shower and her skin still warm as she grabs Thea’s hand and drags her in the opposite direction, down the science hallway and into a janitor’s closet that locks from the inside. 

A bare bulb above their heads casts an orange light over a tidy shelf of cleaning supplies and a rack of keys. Freddie’s lips are on Thea’s as soon as the door shuts, her hands fumbling up Thea’s sleeves to slide her bra straps down her arms. Thea clutches her, letting her tongue slip into Freddie’s mouth as instinctively as if she’d been kissing her all her life. Her damp hair tickles Thea’s wrists, the shampoo smell of her even stronger and nicer fresh out of the shower. Thea breathes her in as they kiss, fast and clumsy, Freddie’s hands suddenly tugging Thea’s oversized T-shirt up and off over her head and tossing it behind them into a corner. 

Thea’s wearing a plain black bra, a goodwill bargain piece that sort-of fit. Freddie, she discovers as she yanks the other girl’s tank top off in jerky movements, is wearing nothing underneath but her charm necklace. Thea skates her hands up Freddie’s sides, her skin soft and hot from the water, and almost melts as they trace the hard ladder of her ribs, the soft down of her armpits. She cups Freddie’s breast and Freddie mirrors the action, her warm hand landing uncertainly against Thea’s worn-out bra before she bends her head to plant wet, open-mouthed kisses to Thea’s neck. 

Thea shivers, and Freddie trails the kisses in a line up Thea’s neck and cheek, her hand sneaking around to the back of Thea’s short hair and tugging it gently. She’s backed Thea into a wall, and she can feel the sharp plane of a shelf pressing into her lower back, though the pain is so insubstantial at the moment that she hardly notices.

Thea hooks her finger in the silver chain around Freddie’s neck, the one she’s taken to following with her eye in class until it disappears into the collar of Freddie’s shirts, leaving a slight indentation below the fabric until it ended between her breasts. She twists the chain gently around her finger, tugging the topless cheerleader nearer until her eye alights on the metal charm that she’s holding between forefinger and thumb, something she’d never noticed before - a thick silver cross. 

“What’s this?” Thea asks, a bit too loudly for the setting they’re in, hoping the panic that had suddenly flared into her stomach isn’t conveyed in her tone. Freddie glances down at it, her voice a seductive whisper in the dark. 

“My confirmation necklace.” 

She moves to kiss Thea again, but Thea presses a hand against her chest to stop her. She blinks, trying to adjust her eyes to the dim light, her body suddenly feeling ten degrees colder. “You’re religious?” 

“I guess so. Inherited.” Freddie grins at that, her lips swollen and a flush visible below her freckles, even in the orange light. “I mean, my dad’s the town pastor.” 

She leans in again, but Thea pushes her back, the cold feeling running in an icy finger up her spine. For a long, horrible moment, Thea only stares at her and lets the words settle into her brain. Then, having ascertained that Freddie’s not joking, Thea bursts into sudden, hysterical laughter. She laughs so hard and loud that Freddie has to grab her shaking arm and clamp her hand over Thea’s mouth. 

“Thea, ssh, shh, what the hell-?” 

“This is just my fucking luck,” Thea laughs, hysterical tears rising in her eyes. “You - The fucking _pastor’_ s daughter, I-” 

She’s wiping her eyes, her hands shaking violently, and for the first time, Freddie sees the fear in her expression. Thea keeps talking, seemingly to herself, her wet eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the distance. “You really know how to pick ‘em, don’t you Thea.” 

“What are you talking about?” demands Freddie, frightened and hurt. She crosses her arms over her bare chest. “Why does that change anything?” 

Thea drops her face into her hands, and Freddie’s not sure if she’s still hysterically laughing or if she’s sobbing. “This is just my fucking luck,” she whisper-laughs, her voice hoarse. “I knew this was a bad idea. I knew it, but fuck, you were so _fucking_ persistent-” 

“What is your problem?” Freddie snaps, stepping forward so that their bodies are almost touching. “My dad’s job has nothing to do with me. For your information, he and I have completely different opinions most of the time.” 

“Right,” Thea looks up, nodding sarcastically, her face and voice suddenly hard as stone. “Because this is your little Catholic rebellion to show him he doesn’t own you. And when he finds out, and you get cold feet, you’re going to tell him you never meant for it to get this far, and you’ll go back to being Mommy and Daddy’s little girl again while I get stuck with the blame.” 

Freddie feels like she’s been slapped. Her mouth is dry, and her hands curl of their own will into trembling fists. “I am nothing like my parents, and I will never be. You don’t know anything about me.” 

Thea yells in her face, loud and sudden, still laughing. “You’re a cheerleader! You’re a fucking cheerleader! What else is there to know?” 

“I’ll fucking show you what else there is to know,” Freddie spits out, furious, and shoves Thea hard into the wall. Thea laughs hatefully as her back hits the shelf, baring her teeth inches in from Freddie’s throat. Her eyes are glittering in the dark of the closet, both of them breathing hard, their faces still too close. 

“You wanna know why I moved here?” Thea asks. “Why I had to move? Her name was Joanie,” she spits out. “That’s why. And she and I did everything that you and I did in that car last night. And we did it for months and months and months and she said she loved me, and then her parents found out and she changed her story. You wanna hear the new story?” 

She steps toward Freddie, forcing her to step back toward the opposite wall. “I brainwashed her. That’s what she told them. I brainwashed her and manipulated her and fucked with her head, and I took advantage of her every single time. And she had to pray to God every night for I don’t know how long to get that out of her. My fault. Mine.” 

She keeps walking, pinning Freddie to the wall with one hand hard pressing hard into her bicep. “She told my parents and her parents and I don’t know who else that I was the devil. And that cross around your neck tells me you’d do the same thing.” 

Thea releases her, and her hot breath leaves Freddie’s face as she steps back. 

“I am nothing like them, Thea,” Freddie says slowly. “I would never, ever-” 

“Don’t touch me.” 

Thea rips her arm away from Freddie’s searching hand, and Freddie lets it fall uselessly back to her side. 

“She believes every word, you know.” Thea snarls, shoving Freddie back into the wall. “My parents made me see her one last time so that I could apologize to her, and she told me that I was evil and I ruined her life. She really believes that, Freddie. I’m the fucking antichrist.” 

“Well, fuck her,” replies Freddie. Thea’s face goes pink. 

“FUCK YOU!” she yells, and grabs her shirt off the floor, yanking it on inside-out. Freddie lunges to follow her, but Thea slams the closet door in her face, sprint-walking down the hallway at top speed toward the exit. To her relief, Freddie doesn’t follow her right away - she still had her bag to contend with, and wherever her tank top had ended up - but all too soon Thea hears her name being shouted from down the hallway. She grits her teeth and keeps walking, shoving the bar of the exit door unnecessarily hard as she shoulders through into the parking lot. 

"THEA!" Freddie shouts, raising her voice as though Thea could possibly have neglected to hear her. The parking lot is almost completely vacant - it had been awhile since the game had ended, and the whole student body and faculty had long since dispersed. Thea's bike is easy to spot, sitting alone in the middle of the pavement, and Thea makes a beeline for it. 

"Thea, wait." Freddie's voice is low, no longer a shout, but Thea still can't stop herself from slowing at the tone, her mind screaming at her body not to give in as she turns to face Freddie again.

"What?!" she snaps, with more bravado then she feels. 

Freddie opens her mouth. _I would never hurt you_ , is what she had meant to say. But staring into Thea's face is making the rage bubble back up inside her until she can’t keep her temper in check. 

"What is your fucking problem?" she yells instead. "Someone hurt you, I get that. But you don't get to decide that I'm the same."

Thea snarls at her. "Bullshit! You're all the same. I knew from the minute I saw you. Sheltered prissy little church kids. You. Her. Your parents. Probably your stupid fucking _brother_ too.” 

It's a low blow - Thea regrets it once it's out, but it’s too late to take it back. Freddie’s face turns slowly crimson, but her eyes never lose their fury. "I am nothing like them!" Freddie yells across the parking lot, and Thea knows she’s hit a nerve. “You know nothing about me!” 

Thea laughs, cold and cutting. “I know more than enough.” 

"I am nothing like them," Freddie replies through gritted teeth, her hands curled into fists as she stalks past Thea, their shoulders bumping hard enough that Thea stumbles. "I'll prove it."

Thea turns, watching Freddie's retreating back as she walks away. There’s a million and one more insults running through her head, but they keep getting lost on the way to her lips. Her chest is heaving like she’s just finished football practice, and she can’t seem to catch her breath. She watches Freddie numbly, realizing she’s walking directly toward the parking space that houses her bike. What the hell was she-

Before Thea’s astonished eyes, Freddie tosses her hair back and climbs astride the bike, planting one foot firmly on the pedals. She looks up and makes eye contact with Thea, her eyes flint-cold before she looks away. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” Thea snaps, but Freddie doesn’t answer. Her hands travel experimentally over the handlebars as though looking for something, and finally Thea watches her open the choke and stab at the cut-off. 

“You need a key,” Thea taunts, her hand moving to her hip pocket where she kept her bike keys. She pauses when her fingers brush denim and nothing else, shoving her hand quickly into the gap to ascertain it was empty. Freddie had just bumped into her, hard… 

Fuck. 

Freddie looks up at her, her eyes hard and unreadable as she turns the key in the ignition. Making direct eye contact with Thea, she twists the clutch and opens the throttle. The motorcycle cranks to life, spilling the throaty roar of machinery out into the quiet suburban air. 

Thea balls her hands back into fists as Freddie pushes the kickstand up. She wouldn’t. She was too fucking chicken. “Get off,” Thea snarls, taking a hard step toward her before stopping herself. She wouldn’t give Freddie the satisfaction of seeing her get mad. 

“You won’t fucking do it,” she taunts instead. “Give me my key back.” 

Another squeeze of the throttle and the bike lurches forward a few feet. Freddie miraculously stays on top, her bare legs hugging the sides of the seat and her hands wrapped around the grip. She doesn’t have a helmet, or anything remotely resembling safety gear for that matter - if she toppled over once in those thin shorts and tank top she’d be nothing more than human Jell-O. 

Whether she’s suicidal or stupid, Thea doesn’t have time to find out. Freddie picks up speed, piloting the bike in a vicious circle around Thea, the muffler rattling loudly and polluting the quiet air with pops and growls. The wheels spray up stinging flecks of stone and dust as the bike bows dangerously close to the ground, Freddie somehow keeping her balance on the back. 

“Get off my damn bike!” Thea yells, but is only answered by the sound of crunching gravel as Freddie suddenly swings the bike off the smooth surface of the parking lot and onto the driveway leading to the road. Scared, Thea flings both her curved hands up to her mouth as a megaphone. “YOU’RE NOT PROVING ANYTHING!” she yells at her. “GET OFF IT RIGHT NOW-” 

The bike suddenly roars at top speed down the driveway and out the hedge-lined entrance leading to the street. Thea stands stock still, staring at the place Freddie had disappeared as the roar of her motorbike growls from behind the hedge, the sound growing softer as Freddie drives away. Directly into traffic. 

“What the fuck,” Thea whispers, patting her pocket uselessly again for the missing key, her heart in her throat. She can’t move, can’t even breathe - she must be going into shock. Freddie had no idea how to drive a motorcycle. If Freddie fell off, if Freddie crashed - _when_ Freddie crashed - oh, fuck, and fucking stupid fucking _Oscar_ \- 

She’s up and running before she’s even aware of it, sprinting harder than she’s ever run before in her life, her heart beating so hard in her mouth she thinks she’s going to throw up. If the assistant coach had been there with his stopwatch, she probably could have shaved a full second off her best time. Freddie’s truck is parked at the edge of the lot, and Thea flings open the unlocked door and frantically yanks down the sun visor, a pair of keys tumbling down into her lap. 

“Your fucking sister, Oscar!” Thea hisses, scrambling to get the key into the ignition and turning it. The tattered photograph stares down at her, pinned haphazardly above her head. Her heart is pounding, and she’s panting for breath. “Jesus Fucking Christ, your fucking crazy sister, Jesus Christ I swear-” 

The truck jolts backward and rushes in reverse out of the parking spot. Thea swings the wheel around, the tires squealing against the pavement and floors it out onto the road. Far away, an almost microscopic speck in the distance, she can see Freddie and the bike heading in a straight line toward the centre of town. 

“FREDDIE!” screams Thea, though there’s no way the other girl can possibly hear her. Freddie’s silhouette swerves past a huge semi truck, and Thea dodges an oncoming minivan and blasts through a red light, hot on her tail. A slow-moving bus bars her way, and Thea zooms up over the curb to avoid it, leaving a streak of tire tracks across someone’s lawn. Her hands are shaking on the steering wheel and she can taste copper and bile in her mouth. The speedometer is gaining on seventy, eighty, eighty-five. 

A sharp blast of a horn tears through the air, but Thea doesn’t bother to turn around in her seat. Her eyes are fixed on the motorcyclist that she’s slowing gaining on, close enough now to see Freddie’s tangled hair blowing out behind her in the glaring absence of a helmet. 

“FREDDIE!” she shouts again, though her voice is trapped behind the glass windows of the truck. She wants to blow the horn, but resists out of fear that Freddie would crash the bike if startled. “Pull over!” Thea screams, mostly to herself. “STOP THE BIKE!” 

She’s drawing even with Freddie now, pushing ninety in the left lane. Taking her eyes off the road, Thea stares out the passenger side window at her friend. Freddie’s staring straight ahead, completely fearless, her grip iron-clad on the handlebars and her hair swirling around her face. “FREDDIE, I TAKE IT BACK!” Thea yells. She turns her eyes back to the road just in time to zip into the oncoming lane and avoid a sedan that had hit the brakes ahead of her. Freddie keeps driving. Thea scrambles frantically for a button to open the window and comes up short. She risks a horrified glance at the other side of the car. Hand crank windows. 

“Fuck!” Thea yells, turning the wheel and lunging across the car in one fluid motion, so that the truck pulls up alongside Freddie again, on the correct side of the yellow line. Her grasping fingers scrabble for the window crank, but the cab of the truck is wide and she only manages to brush it with her fingertips. She grits her teeth, straining for the handle, and finally smacks the crank hard enough with the heel of her hand to open the glass a few precarious inches. 

“FREDDIE PULL OVER,” Thea screams, the wind blowing through the crack of the window and buffeting her face. She finally manages to get a good grip on the handle and cranks it down hard, almost wrenching her shoulder out. Freddie’s pulling ahead of her slightly, and Thea slams her foot down on the gas to keep pace with her. The car behind her is honking, and her chest is so tight that she can barely find her voice. Freddie looks so small and exposed on the back of the bike. If she tipped, she’d be a bloody streak on the side of the road. “I’M SORRY!” 

The road is getting narrower, houses closer together. They’re almost at the main strip. Thea’s vision is blurry, and as she swipes, horrified, at her eyes to clear them she realizes they’re stinging with tears. She whips her head around, taking her eyes off the road entirely to make sure she keeps Freddie fully in her sight. 

“FREDDIE STOP THE FUCKING BIKE-!” 

“WHERE ARE THE BRAKES?” Freddie calls back, her tone dangerously nonchalant as she raises her voice to be heard over the wind and the roar of the motor. Her face is carefully expressionless, but Thea can see the hints of fear in it. Her stomach plummets and she feels like throwing up. 

“THERE’S A PEDAL ABOVE YOUR RIGHT FOOT,” Thea yells through the window, her mouth as dry as cotton. “SLOWLY PUSH THAT AND THE LEVERS ON THE HANDLEBARS AT THE SAME TIME. SLOWLY. DON’T LOOK DOWN, JUST DO IT!” 

She glances up just in time to realize the road has narrowed and she’s in the lane of oncoming traffic. Next to her, Freddie yanks the handlebars to the side just in time to miss a row of parked cars, and the bike turns down a narrow alleyway. Thea, running on instinct, fishtails the truck around in a circle to make the turn and narrowly avoids colliding with an oncoming car. 

Freddie flies ahead of her down the alley and out into a wide parking lot, the bike gradually slowing until it brakes with a screech of tires outside a concrete stadium. Her sneakered foot flies down, drags along the pavement, and then catches herself. A fluttering banner above their heads announces the RIVERDALE SPORTS ARENA: ANNOUNCING PEARL JAM OCTOBER 16. 

Thea stops the truck with a hard lurch, but doesn’t kill the engine. She and Freddie are at opposite sides of the parking lot, separated by about forty yards of concrete. Out the side window, she watches as Freddie pushes the kickstand down and gets off Thea’s bike, as nonchalant as a rider climbing down from a horse. She’s completely unharmed. Thea doesn’t move. 

The pop of the truck door seal cuts through the buzzing in Thea’s ears. Her hand is on the handle, the motor still running, the truck in park, her seatbelt off, but she doesn’t remember any of it. As if in a dream, she throws the door open and lets it hang there, a dangerous silence thick in the aftershock of their chase. Breathing hard, Thea slowly and meticulously slides down the bench seat and steps out of the truck. 

“YOU FUCKING IDIOT!” she screams when her feet hit concrete, a rage unlike anything she’s ever known hitting her across the face like whiplash. Her hands are squeezed so tightly into fists that they hurt, and she storms across the pavement in long, fierce strides, intent on nothing more than decking Freddie Andrews in her perfect face and splattering her nose cartilage all over the parking lot. “I’M GOING TO FUCKING KILL YOU, YOU FUCKING BITCH!” 

Freddie’s walking toward her too, tossing her head back to shake out her mane of wild hair. Thea starts running, the rage spilling up into her throat, her fists swinging at her sides as she pictures knocking Freddie down, kicking her hard in the ribs with her motorcycle boots, maybe knocking out her pretty teeth. She runs, her teeth bared, her fingers curled, and she can almost feel that first punch vibrating through her hand and arm, the one that’s going to land right on Freddie’s cheekbone and snap her head around so hard that she’ll have to cheer from a wheelchair. 

She’s rearing back to throw when they’re about ten inches apart, but at the very last second something changes and Thea just grabs her instead, yanking her in, and then her mouth lands on Freddie’s mouth and Freddie’s arms wrap around her and Freddie’s kissing her back like it’s the last kiss they’ll ever have. The kiss is so hard and so desperate that Thea can barely catch her breath, and that must account for the lightheaded, wobbly feeling when Freddie pulls her in tighter and nearly lifts her off her feet, Thea squeezing her eyes shut so tightly that a few tears sneak out and dribble down the sides of her nose. 

Thea stares at her when she’s set back down, and then rears back and hits Freddie full in the face. 

“BITCH!” she screams, as Freddie’s head rolls back with the punch, the skin of Thea’s hand coming away wet and bloody. “FUCK YOU!” 

Freddie grabs her wrist, and for a fleeting moment Thea waits to be hit back - wants to be hit back - but then Freddie crashes their lips together again, her teeth colliding with Thea’s and the blood from her nose flavouring the kiss with copper. Thea cradles Freddie’s face to hold her steady and kisses her, hot and heavy and open-mouthed, blood on her tongue and the kisses growing more gentle every time their lips meet. It doesn’t matter that they’re in public, it feels like they’re alone - Thea’s hands combing through Freddie’s hair, Freddie’s fingers on the back of her neck, her nosebleed running over Thea’s lips and into her mouth as Thea kisses the blood away. Her mind is a hurricane, her emotions up to eleven, and Freddie’s lips so hot and insistent on her own that they block out all the pain. Freddie suddenly lets out a sob, and Thea pushes their foreheads together, closing her eyes against the touch, breathing in Freddie’s air. 

They seem to remember that they’re in public at the same time - by some unspoken cue they step prudently back from one another, not even daring to keep contact with their hands. Thea stares at the ground and then at Freddie’s face - her eyes wet and the skin smudged with mascara, motor oil in a streak across her chin and blood still running down her nose and lips. 

“I hate you,” says Thea hotly, and feels a tear of her own trickle down her chin. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.” 

Freddie just nods, her face brave and impassive, and Thea knows damn well that they both know _hate_ isn’t the right word at all. 


	8. Chapter 8

Freddie eases Oscar’s truck slowly up the winding road, letting it come to a stop and parking before the largest house on the block. The Lodge house was separated from its neighbours by a small forest of pine trees - a modern mansion set directly on the lake, with its own small harbour behind for mooring yachts. The exterior was made of metal, wood, and gleaming black stone, with a slanted roof and tons of full-length windows that followed the roofline. A meticulously kept lawn and garden separated it from the well-paved road. 

Right now, though, it looked more like a scene from a movie than a picture in a catalogue. The perfect lawn was scattered with red solo cups and garbage, and the enormous driveway was clustered with cars. Light spilled out from every window and the open doorway, where loud rap music was pounding out. There were kids everywhere - drinking and smoking and talking in groups on the lawn and around the cars - Freddie could even see a few figures on the roof. 

Freddie sighs and uncurls her shaking grip from the steering wheel - although she’s calmed down considerably since her joyride, her hands won’t stop trembling. It was terror, but it was exhilaration too. Just for the length of that stretch of road, she’d neglected the fear that had plagued her for the past six months. She’d gone in direct opposition to her parents’ most important rule. Just for those few moments, she’d felt completely free. 

She and Thea had gone their separate ways from the parking lot only a few hours ago, and despite everything she’d been through that day, Freddie had found herself going through the motions of making an appearance at this party. She’d taken the stairs up to her bathroom two at a time, wiped the blood off her face, and immediately done her makeup and picked out a party outfit, leaving so many clothes scattered across her messy attic room that it had looked like the bargain bin at a closing-out sale. 

She still wasn’t happy with her outfit - she’d been almost out the door in her jeans and t-shirt, giving up hope of finding anything that didn’t make her look either frumpy, overdressed, underdressed, or overweight, when she’d gritted her teeth and done an abrupt about-face. Now she was wearing a too-tight white skirt and a too-boring slinky black top - not really her style, but party appropriate. On her wrist she was wearing a slender gold watch Hank had once bought her - ironic, because Freddie never really bothered to tell time. She usually ran by her own schedule, and was pretty sure the thing was off by at least an hour. The watch she’d paired with another gift from Hank - a diamond bracelet that kept yanking out her arm hairs every time she moved. 

She flips down the sun visor and checks her face in the mirror. Her nose is throbbing where Thea had hit her, but a few drinks would take care of that. At least it wasn’t broken. There was some bruising, but she’d done a bang-up job of covering it with foundation. In fact, she looked like she always did - more than good enough to put in a forty-five-minute appearance and then go home. 

Freddie breathes in the scent of pine air as she steps out of the cab, feeling herself slip effortlessly into the routine of the night. She’d been to so many house parties she could navigate them in her sleep - even if it hadn’t been for her status on the cheerleading squad, the thought of being left out from Monday morning conversations tortured her whenever she stayed home. 

Your youth was supposed to be the time you were young and dumb and riotous - even if sometimes she felt so disengaged from these events that it was kind of like clocking in to work. Most of the time she ended up having a blast - but having to drag her feet into Hiram’s house didn’t exactly promise an evening to remember. 

“Hey, Freddie!” calls one of her baseball teammates from the lawn, visible mostly by the red amber and ghostly smoke of the cigarette he’s holding. The odor of drinks, weed, smoke, and sweaty air hits her full in the face - a house party cocktail. If they could capture that they could sell it in candles, and every teen in America would recognize the scent. “How are you doin?” 

“Hey, Freddie!” calls someone else. “What’s up, babe?” 

“Freddie’s here!” 

“Hi, Freddie!” 

Freddie grins and waves her hellos, slipping through the front door and into the hot stuffiness of the house. A crystal chandelier dangles over her head, with someone’s underwear caught in the chain. She doesn’t have to ask to know that the crystal is real. Pushing her way through bodies, Freddie follows the wall to the kitchen, where a makeshift bar has been set up on a marble island. She grabs a beer from the fridge and pops the tab, taking a long drink as she looks around for Hank. He’d definitely be thrilled to see her - she’d laid the history project excuse on a little thick at lunch. 

“Freddie!” She glances up in time to see a group of her classmates standing around the kitchen table, damp shot glasses in hand. Sierra Samuels motions at her. “Do you want a shot?” 

“You bet,” Freddie replies, crossing the kitchen to shove in beside her friends. Freddie’s never said no to that question. Sierra hands her a shot glass, and a redheaded boy tops it up with a generous amount of tequila, slopping it all over her fingers and Hank’s watch in the process. 

“One… two…. three….” Freddie counts down with the group, and then tosses her head back and drains the shot. It’s bad tequila - it tastes like licking a toilet seat, and it burns all the way down her throat. The whole group is all smiles and jokes about it, patting one another on the back and making faces as they bite into limes. Freddie smiles back at them, feeling her shoulders relax for the first time. It’s definitely a placebo effect, but she can feel her stress melting away already, her inhibitions lowering. 

“Have you seen Hank?” she yells at Sierra over the music. Sierra pulls a sad face and shakes her head no. 

“No worries,” Freddie assures her, and it’s not. She feels comfortable and at ease in this setting, and she’s not exactly dying to see Hank anyway. There’s some tequila left at the very bottom her shot glass, and she tips it up to her lips a second time. 

“Have you eaten anything?” Sierra asks loudly, leaning in and making a hand gesture to communicate above the pounding rap. “We were going to go for Pop’s. Muggs is driving.” She nods to indicate her friend, who toasts her with her shot glass of water and smiles good-naturedly. “We can bring you back something too.” 

“I’m good,” Freddie lies - that salad at lunch was the last thing in her stomach, but Sierra had ample past parties to go off of when she flagged this as a point of concern. Something about being babied grated Freddie the wrong way - Alice was allowed to do it, but that was all. She grabs a bag of chips to hammer the point home. “I’ve got chips now too.” 

She takes a big handful as Sierra and her friends file out, and lifts them to her mouth like she’s about to bite. Once they’re gone, though, she tosses the whole stack in the sink. Freddie leaves the kitchen by the opposite door, looking around for other members of the cheerleading squad. Instead she sees a group of Mason’s asshole friends sitting around the stone fireplace, looking decidedly unhappy. 

The only tolerable boy among them is Ed Lopez, who also happens to be Hank’s close friend, and would probably know exactly where her boyfriend is. Freddie sighs and walks up to interrupt their conversation, taking another swig of her beer for good luck. 

“Hi Ed,” she says, ignoring Marcus and the others. Ed had been a really sweet guy when they were growing up, but since becoming a football player he spent far too much time around the likes of Marty Mantle and Marcus Mason. Despite the fact that her entire back is to him, Marcus answers her. 

“Hey, Easy Freddie.” 

Freddie tenses at the nickname. There were two channels of guys in this school: those who thought she was a slut, and those who thought she was a prude. Both teased her equally. She glances over her shoulder at the douchebag in question, who takes a long swallow from his drink. 

“Eat a dick, Marcus. I’m talking to your friend.” She turns around again to face Ed. “I’m looking for Hank. Where is he?” 

Ed frowns. “He was looking for you earlier. He’s out on the boat.” With a nod of his head, he indicates the towering sliding glass doors at the far end of the living room. The night sky and the treeline beyond them is inky black, but a few patio lanterns offer reassuring white balls of light. 

Freddie sighs. No way would Hiram Lodge let anyone drink on his boat alone - so that meant if she went out there she was guaranteed a run-in with him. Still, what was the point of being here if she didn’t at least speak to her boyfriend? 

“Thanks, Ed,” she replies, tightening her grip on her beer and heading to the door. 

The glass door opens with a sliding sound so soft that it’s almost inaudible. A few crickets chirp from the woods, and the deck beneath her feet is wet from the hot tub as Freddie steps down onto the dirt path leading down to the lake. She passes a gleaming chrome barbecue and a stylish patio, as well as a black wrought iron fire pit flanked by artificial logs. Finally, she comes upon the dock, where a brand new houseboat is bobbing up and down. Black script on the side spells out it’s name: the Lodge King - undoubtedly meant to refer to Hiram himself. 

Freddie rolls her eyes and walks up the gangplank. A few people are leaning against the boat’s railing with drinks, and one girl is sitting on the mast with her feet dangling down. Unfortunately, none of them, she ascertains as she squints to see faces, are her boyfriend. Freddie glances momentarily off the side of the boat into the lake, but the water is calm and still. No one is swimming. 

“Is Hiram in here?” she asks another girl on the deck, reaching out to touch the smooth wood panelling of the door leading to the boat’s interior. The girl nods in a bored way, turning her eyes almost immediately back to her friends. Freddie shrugs and pushes it open. 

“Hank?” she whispers. The boat is almost pitch dark inside, but she can hear voices issuing from the darkness ahead of her. Freddie stumbles along as the boat rocks beneath her, feeling her way with the wall, using the crack of light from the door she’d left slightly ajar to guide her. Her hand bumps into another gold knob and she leans her ear to the wood. Hiram’s voice comes through loud as day, a faint golden glow at her feet telling her that he must have a lamp burning inside. 

“This boat cost five million dollars, you know,” she hears Hiram brag. “There’s a state of the art sound system, too. It’ll be perfect for parties.” 

“Wow,” replies Hank’s voice. Annoyingly, it sounds like he’s hanging on Hiram’s every word. 

“You’re supposed to name boats after women, Hiram,” Freddie announces as she throws the door open, thrilled to be able to catch him off guard for once. She sure didn’t  _ want _ to interact with Hiram, but at least she could have fun with it. “If you-” 

Freddie goes abruptly silent as she realizes what she’s seeing. Hiram and her boyfriend are both tangled up in bed together, the sheets barely covering the lower half of their bodies. There’s no mistaking what they’d been up to - Freddie’s done more than enough kissing to know what it looks like. This one looks like it had been a marathon session. 

Her jaw drops. She stares, open-mouthed and horrified as Hiram jumps out of bed, giving her a horrific eyeful of his tan lines. 

“GET OFF MY FUCKING BOAT!” Hiram yells at her, and Freddie doesn’t have to be told twice. With a last betrayed glance at Hank, she turns on her heel and sprints back out onto the deck, barreling down the gangplank and up the hill in the direction of the house. 

“Freddie!” She’s almost at the fire when she hears Hank running behind her, oddly graceful on the packed dirt. “Freddie,” he calls urgently. “Wait!” 

Freddie spins around to face him so quickly that her hair flies around and slaps her in the mouth. “What the hell, Hank!?” she screams, all of the rage suddenly simmering up in her throat. A few of the students by the fire glance over at the noise. 

“Don’t shout!” Hank closes the distance between them in long, quick strides, his eyes flashing with purpose as he draws up chest-to-chest with her. He drops his voice to an appropriate register, keeping them below the notice of the firepit kids. “Listen, I can explain everything. I’m not-” 

“I don’t care that you’re gay, Hank!” Freddie hisses. “I don’t even care that you cheated on me. But  _ Hiram?  _ Hiram Lodge!?” 

To her displeasure, Hank doesn’t even look ashamed. Instead, he scoffs. “Oh, like I don’t know what’s going on with you and Thea. I can see the way you look at her, Freddie. I’m not an idiot. You’re practically scissoring her with your eyes every time you’re together.” 

Freddie gapes at him, her stomach turning in a way that has nothing to do with the booze. She’d never in her wildest dreams believed that Hank would talk to her like that - his tone is as cold and harsh as the freezing water in the lake. He laughs at her discomfort. 

“Come on, Freddie. You really thought I didn’t notice? You can barely keep it in your pants when she’s around.” 

“How…” Freddie’s breath is frozen in her lungs, and she can feel tears filling her eyes. She takes a step back from him, her mouth wide open. “How dare you. I can’t - I don’t - We’re done!” 

“What?” 

“We’re done!” Freddie yanks off the diamond bracelet, taking a good chunk of her arm hair with it, and flings it at his feet. “It’s over between us.” 

“What do you mean we’re done?” Hank demands, raising his voice to the same volume. He glares at her with anger like Freddie’s never seen. “Put that back on. We’re going to be Prom King and Queen.” 

“Are you crazy!? Are you fucking crazy!?” 

“Are  _ you _ fucking crazy!?” Even in the low light, she can tell Hank’s face is turning red. “You want to throw this all away over a stupid argument-?” 

“A stupid argument! You cheated on me!” Freddie knows she’s being the worst hypocrite in the world right now, but her anger at Hank is more important. “Or did I not see what I thought I saw!?” 

“A stupid mistake, then!” Hank takes a step closer to her. “That’s what all of this was, right?” 

A series of images scrolls through Freddie’s mind like a flipbook. Thea tucking her hair behind her ears. Thea at football tryouts. Thea in the pouring rain. Thea’s lips on her cheek. Thea’s hand on her breast. The janitors closet. The motorbike. Her brother, the last time she’d ever seen him. The bloody kisses in the parking lot. Thea swearing at her as they walked to their respective vehicles, saying she never wanted to see her again. Was it a mistake? Was it? 

Freddie realizes she’s unconsciously fingering the cross around her neck. She could stop everything now. She could prove Thea right on all counts. She could make all of this just a mistake she’d once made. 

She could be the fucking Prom Queen. 

“Leave me alone, Hank.” Freddie pulls down on the cross until the chain cuts into her neck. “I mean it. I don’t want to see you anymore tonight.” 

“We’ll talk about this tomorrow,” Hank says confidently. He bends down and picks up the diamond bracelet and slips it into his pocket, pausing to glare at the kids who are staring at them. 

_ Give Hiram your stupid bracelet, _ Freddie wants to say, but she doesn’t dare. 

Hank catches her by the wrist, sweet as honey once again. “And you won’t tell anyone about this,” he pleads sweetly. “Won’t you, Freddie?” 

His face is sweet and open, but his eyes are dark, and Freddie can read what he _ really _ means all over his gaze, plain as day.  _ You won’t tell anyone because you know I’ll tell about you and Thea, and I’ll have evidence,  _ say his eyes.  _ You won’t tell because you know I’ll make your life a living hell.  _

Hank was a master manipulator - it was how he always got away with handing assignments in late and bullying the less popular cheerleaders while ensuring they’d still jump at his every request. He could turn on the charm like honey and bat his dark eyes and make anything happen. Failing that, he could always twist your words or logic around until suddenly you were to blame, or his suggestion was your idea. It was something that had always bothered Freddie about him - in her opinion, one of his most unfavourable traits. Now she’s repulsed by it. 

Freddie nods stiffly and turns to face the house, mostly so Hank won’t see her cry. She would never have told anyone Hank’s secret - but the fact that he clearly trusted her so little is the icing on the already fucked-up cake. Freddie can’t help but let out a sniffle as she stares at the grass, tears flowing down her bruised cheeks and into her lip. She starts walking away, her hands balled up in the fabric of her skirt. 

“You’ll feel better about this on Monday,” Hank insists from behind her. 

“Go to hell,” Freddie sobs, and takes off at a run past the astonished crowd at the firepit and back toward the porch. 


	9. Chapter 9

“Alice!” yells Freddie, rushing up the modern wood-and-glass staircase of the Lodge mansion at top speed, tears filling her eyes and obscuring her vision. “Alice, where are you!?” 

She hits a wood-panelled door in the upstairs hallway with her whole body weight, and for the second time in the past twenty minutes, flings the door wide open on a couple in bed together. 

“Woah!” Hal exclaims, sitting quickly upright and pulling the covers up over himself. He looks quickly from Freddie to Alice, his mouth wide open. “What’s going on?” 

“Freddie, what is it?” Alice asks immediately, climbing off the bed. She pulls her skirt up and pins it around her waist, otherwise fully clothed in a black camisole over a lace bralette. Freddie lets her head clunk hard against the doorframe, closing her eyes to give them some weak semblance of privacy. Tears spill through her closed lids and streak down her cheeks, and for a moment she feels annoyance and shame - it seemed like all she’d done was cry lately. Over Oscar, over Thea, over Hank… 

“I’m sorry,” sobs Freddie, sliding down the wall into a sitting position and covering her face with her hands. “I’m sorry, Hank and I broke up.” 

Alice is by her side in an instant, kneeling on the carpet and resting a steadying hand on Freddie’s shoulder. “Really?” 

Freddie just nods, sniffling wetly and trying unsuccessfully to wipe her face clean of tears with the palm of her hand. Alice scrambles for a jewelled box of tissues on a nearby table and helps her dab at her mascara-stained face. 

“Freddie, how drunk are you?” she asks, cleaning a smudge of makeup from under Freddie’s eye. 

“I only had one shot,” insists Freddie furiously. For some reason it was suddenly the most important thing in the world that she communicates this. “I only had one shot, Alice, and I had one beer!” She slaps Alice’s hand away, the wet tissue in it. “It’s just on an empty stomach so it’s hitting me harder-” 

“Freddie-” 

Just then, a fifth person barrels into the room, interrupting them. “Freddie!” chirps Penelope, her red hair tied back into a ponytail and her cheeks flushed with excitement. “I heard you and Hank had a big fight outside! Is it true!?” 

“Can you fuck off, please?” Alice snaps at Penelope, putting her hands on her hips. “You’re the last person we need right now, and we don’t need you getting material for your gossip column.” 

If Freddie hadn’t felt so morose, she would have smiled. In reality, it was Alice who ran the Blue and Gold’s highly buzzworthy gossip column - but Alice swore it would interfere with her journalistic integrity if word were every to get out. The information was on lockdown - only Alice, Freddie, and Hal, the paper’s editor, had any idea. Someone had jumped to the assumption that it was Penelope Blossom somewhere along the way, and Alice had never bothered to correct the rumour. 

If anyone passed along any tidbits to Penelope, you could be sure Alice would hear them eventually. Penelope and gossip went hand in hand. Right now she looked like the cat who had swallowed the canary, but the redhead rearranges her face into an appropriately sorrowful expression for Freddie’s benefit. 

“Freddie, I’m sorry to hear that. You two were so cute together. We all thought you were going to be prom king and queen.” 

Alice stands up from the plush carpeting and steps closer to Penelope, her eyes flashing dangerously. Freddie can practically hear the static electricity crackling between them. If this came to blows, it wouldn’t be their first fight - or their last. 

“Leave her alone,” she snarls, crowding Penelope’s personal space. She softens her tone to address her friend. “Freddie, give Hal and I two minutes to get dressed and we’ll all go to Pop’s, okay?” She glares daggers at Penelope. “Not you.” 

Freddie nods tearfully, using the doorframe to pull herself up to a standing position. Alice throws a last dirty look at Penelope and crosses the room to hug Freddie tight, letting the taller girl sob freely into her shoulder She rubs Freddie’s back soothingly - a complete contrast from the person who had been about to scratch Penelope’s eyes out. “I know,” Alice murmurs. “I know. Let it out.” 

“I’m sorry,” chokes out Freddie, sniffling hard. Hal is still sitting in the bed with the expensive duvet wrapped around him. “I interrupted you-” 

“It’s fine, we were just doing hand stuff,” says Alice airily. Hal turns every shade of crimson in the book. He throws a horrified glance at Penelope, who turns just as pink and runs out of the room.

“I’m fine,” murmurs Freddie, feeling claustrophobic despite the bedroom’s size. She turns toward the door where Penelope had disappeared, wiping a tear from her cheek and striding purposefully out of Alice’s grip and toward the hallway. “I’ll just, uh - wait outside.” 

Penelope glares at Freddie as soon as she’s out of the room, her arms folded so tight in displeasure that Freddie wonders if she’ll ever be able to unpretzel them. “She didn’t have to be so nasty to me,” she shoots at Freddie, and maybe it’s the drink, but Freddie could swear she sees tears in Penelope’s eyes. “I swear, that girl has no manners.” 

Freddie can feel a headache coming on, and she’s not in the mood to listen. She starts walking quickly down the hall away from the door, and Penelope plants her hands on her hips. 

“What are you doing? Alice said she’d be out in a second.” 

Freddie ignores her, walking faster. 

“Freddie, should I tell them where you’re going?” Penelope is hurrying to keep pace with her. “Where are you going?” 

The upper hallway ends in a double set of french doors, hung with elegant white curtains. Opening them, Freddie steps out onto a wide wooden balcony overlooking the lake. She glances down at the lawn beneath the balcony, and then at the jutting stone accents that almost form a series of steps down the wall beside it. It would be easy to get down this way - she’d only have to step from the ledge of the balcony to the wall. 

Freddie swings one leg over the thick wooden railing, and Penelope seizes her suddenly around the waist, tight. “No!” she screams, pulling Freddie against her. “He’s not worth it!” 

“Get off me! I’m just going to get another drink!” Freddie tries to peel Penelope’s hands off her waist, but the redhead is gripping her too tight. “Penelope, I’m climbing down. I’m going to be fine. Look, I’m going down the wall.” 

She tears herself out of Penelope’s grip and steps gingerly down onto the thin ledge on the other side of the railing. Her vision swims minutely, and for just a moment Freddie wonders if attempting this feat while drunk is the best idea. Penelope’s hand suddenly flashes out and grabs Freddie’s wrist, tight. “I am not letting you fall,” Penelope says, through gritted teeth. 

“Come on, it’ll be something to tell people,” Freddie snaps. “You can tell everyone I jumped.” 

Penelope’s face turns the same angry red as her hair. “I am not a gossip, Freddie! If I don’t tell people things, how will they know?” 

“You’re providing a public service, huh?” Freddie glances sideways at the stone wall. She starts inching along the rim of the balcony toward it. Penelope steps with her, still holding on to her wrist in a grip tighter than Freddie would have thought her narrow hands capable. “Is that what you do?” 

“I hate you!” Penelope snaps at her as Freddie’s toe scrapes the first jutting stone, ignoring Penelope as best she can. With her free hand, she fits her fingers into the groove of the wooden siding. Penelope’s face is pink and angry, and she jerks suddenly on Freddie’s wrist to stop her, almost yanking her off the balcony. 

“Pen- shit-” Freddie grabs the railing in both hands, gripping tightly. “Look, I’d have done this already if you’d just-” 

“You don’t even know how good you have it. Everyone likes you. Everyone. If I didn’t talk about people, no one would know I even exist!” There are tears swimming in Penelope’s eyes. “I notice things. I listen. I care. You don’t even do anything, and everyone wants to be like you.” 

Freddie stares at Penelope full in the face, her drunken mind trying sluggishly to decode the words she’s hearing. She wants to same something witty and kind, but all she can conjure up is: 

“Huh?” 

With a wet scoff, Penelope suddenly spins around and pushes back through the curtained doors, leaving Freddie alone. The brunette stands dumbly on the thin ledge on the other side of the railing, staring at the empty balcony. 

“Wait,” Freddie calls uselessly after her, but there’s no reply. Penelope’s probably already back into the thick of the party. She glances behind her, and then down at the ground below the balcony. It suddenly seems a long way away. 

Penelope had been right about one thing - Alice would kill her if she found her standing here. Freddie lifts one leg experimentally, and manages to swing it back over to the other side, straddling the rail. She tilts her head back as she does to look at the sky, momentarily mesmerized by the sprinkling of stars above her head. The cool October air is cutting through the buzz of the alcohol, and she wishes fleetingly for a jacket. Had Hank been with her she’d be using his cheerleading jacket, only Hank wasn’t with her, because they were broken up now and Hank would never be with her again. That was going to take some getting used to. 

For starters, she’d have to buy her own jacket. 

“Freddie?” A boy’s voice issues up out of the darkness. “You okay up there?”

Freddie looks down to the lawn below her, and for a moment thinks she’s managed to wish her boyfriend (ex-boyfriend, as of nine minutes ago) back into her orbit. But her vision clears, and she suddenly recognizes the guy standing at the base of the lawn, clad in a grey fall coat that has no affiliation whatsoever with the Riverdale High athletics department. 

“Tom?” she calls uncertainly down. “Keller?” 

“Yeah, it’s me.” The graduated senior tucks his hands into the pockets of his coat, leaning his neck back to look up at her. He seems anxious - possibly because, like Penelope, he expects her to break her neck at any moment. “You coming down, or going up?” 

“Coming down,” Freddie says decisively. She swings her leg halfway back over the rail, but Tom throws up both hands in a plea for her to stop. 

“Wait - Freddie - hang on - do me a favour.” 

“For you?” Freddie’s starting to enjoy it, playing damsel in distress, her years of cheerleading keeping her balanced as she leans further into the empty air. Her mind is sparkling drunk and enjoyably slow, the sweet spot between tipsy and drunk. She gives Tom her most flirtatious smile, suspended above a drop that would probably break at least a leg. “Anything.” 

Tom just stands below her, both hands out like he’d catch her if she fell. “Please,” he begs. “Take the stairs.” 

* * *

Shit, thinks Thea as she pulls up to the driveway of Hiram Lodge’s gleaming black lakehouse. _Big house. Okay. Now I get it._

This house party was the last place on earth she’d expected to make an appearance after she’d left Freddie in the stadium parking lot, but a few steps into her trailer and the sight of her father on a drunken bender, throwing beer bottles at the wall, had made her change her mind. There was also the promise of free booze for herself, and the reassurance that no matter what happened, Freddie Andrews wouldn’t show up. Thea had seen enough of her for a lifetime. 

She leaves her bike parked between two expensive-looking cars and walks up the cool grass toward the open front door. The neighbours don’t seem to care about the noise - either that, or the massive homes on either side of the lakehouse, barely visible through a dense covering of trees on either side of the mansion, are uninhabited. Fuck, maybe Hiram owns them too. Thea’s known rich kids before, but shit, this was _rich_ rich - the kind of wealth and comfort she could never aspire to in her wildest dreams. 

She glides through the entryway, keeping to the wall, the throng of bodies and her unassuming outfit - dark jeans, a black tank top, and a leather jacket - allowing her a cover of anonymity. Still, she can’t help tucking her hair down nervously as she passes a group of girls that she recognizes from her homeroom class, feeling itchy and anxious as they follow her momentarily with their eyes. 

Thea’s never been a fixture at house parties - she’d put in a half-hearted forty-five minute appearance at exactly one back in Midvale, on a night where her father was too violent for her to stay home and the sophomore class end-of-year party had offered a convenient respite. Otherwise she simply didn’t have friends to invite her. 

Joanie, as a member of the cheerleading squad, had been to a few. These she recounted to Thea as being scary in an exciting way, their knees brushing too closely under the tables in study hall as Thea stared at Joanie’s manicured fingers on the pencil, her nerves shaking and shot and never close enough to her, willing to listen to anything as long as it was in Joanie’s voice. 

We have fun though, Joanie had insisted once. If you go as part of a group, you have fun. 

But things had ended between them - disastrously - before Thea had ever been invited, and even when things were good, they had to be prudent - Joanie ignoring her in the halls, floating by with her cheerleading friends and Thea taking it, always taking it, because it was worth it to be her friend later, to sit in her spanish tiled kitchen when her parents were gone and eat grapes out of the frosted-glass bowl as she watched her, Joanie in her new swimsuit or in her red-and-white skirt, telling some story that Thea would never remember the details of. 

Joanie had had the kind of house that would have made a good party - bright and airy and with a real back deck, only her parents were far too strict for that. So Thea had never experienced one to know if they were any different in Riverdale than Midvale. And she was certainly never going back to Midvale to compare. 

This is not to say she doesn’t know the theory. She follows the thickest surge of people toward the kitchen - a blisteringly clean room the size of a football field, full of gleaming appliances and a long counter hosting every bottle of booze imaginable. She has to pass an open bar on the way there, a boy with an ear full of piercings playing bartender, but Thea knows better than to let someone else mix her a drink, even in this squeaky-clean Hicksville. Perhaps especially here. 

She pours herself a half-glass of expensive quality bourbon, thinking ironically of her father at home, doing the same thing all night. Thea drains half of it quickly, re-filling the glass before wandering away from the kitchen island and into the carpeted den. Here a handful of students are singing karaoke around the big-screen TV - she gives their smiling faces a wide berth as she finds the plate glass door that leads out to the deck, drawn to the sound of yelling outside. 

The wood is faintly wet, and the culprit seems to be one of two options - a luxurious lighted hot tub, or a stack of leaking kegs against the stone wall. Thea moves through the crowd toward the sound of people chanting, wrongly assuming she’s about to witness a fistfight. 

Instead she finds a tight group of males in school lettermen, all of them shirtless beneath their jackets, supporting another guy upside-down on the keg. The rest of the crowd is chanting as the boy guzzles beer, and Thea finds herself drawn toward the pack instinctively - the noise and the aimlessness of it, the thrill of competition. It’s not until she’s right up in the circle of boys that she locks eyes with one and realizes her mistake - she’s completely surrounded by the players that she’d outdone Thursday on the football field. 

The boy who recognizes her opens his mouth to speak, but before he can sound the alarm the upside-down football player kicks his feet down, flipping back upright in a spray of foam. 

She’s almost unsurprised to see who it is - Marty Mantle lands on his feet and spits on the deck, pounding his chest in victory as the rest of his teammates’ chant dissolves into unmitigated howls of delight. His eyes flicker to Thea almost immediately, and for a moment before his features rearrange into a spiteful grin she sees a look of pure hatred cross his face. 

“Well, look who it is,” he says gleefully, walking right up to Thea, beer dribbling disgustingly down his lips and chin and onto his bare chest. His whole front is soaked, leading to an unfortunate spreading stain on his crotch area. He grins. “Let me guess. You’re done dykeing it out with Freddie Andrews, and you want to try a taste of the Mantle cream pie.” 

A few of the guys whoop and howl. Thea glares at Marty, looking him in the eyes. _He doesn’t know anything,_ she reassures herself, her pulse pounding nevertheless at how close he was to the truth. _He’s just a douchebag._

Marty gets up close to her - she’s blasted with beer smell and feels slightly lightheaded. “You’re out of luck,” he snarls, spraying her with spit. “I don't’ fuck _boys._ ” 

His hand brushes her shoulder, hard, and Thea takes an involuntary step back. Marty’s expression is far too close to her father’s when he’s really hammered - unbalanced and illogical, angry beyond all reason. Marty counts her wince as a victory, laughing cheerfully as he walks back to his circle of admirers. 

“You used to have to do a keg stand to join the football team, back in the day,” he boasts, putting one foot up on the keg like a sailor. He’s so liquor-soaked and disoriented that his foot slips right back off. “Too bad no one has any respect for the old traditions.” 

Thea’s own drink is burning hot and heavy down in the pit of her stomach. She’s not drunk quite yet, but she’s intoxicated enough to stand her ground, even as she recognizes it as a bad idea. 

“You call that a keg stand?” she asks before she could stop herself, shoving her hands in the rear pockets of her jeans and taking a step forward to look mockingly down at him. “I think you’re a fucking pussy if that’s all you can take. Fucking pussy stand.” 

Marty stands there, frozen halfway between her and his teammates, his tongue hanging out of his mouth as he performs some laborious mental calculation about whether to laugh it off or beat her up. His look of disoriented confusion is a perfect copy of her father when she talks back to him - they’re stuck in one of those long moments where Thea knows the storm is coming, but they haven’t yet hit the tipping point that means she’ll have to duck. 

Thea takes another step forward, anger and competition burning in her stomach along with the bourbon, pissed off all the more now that her thoughts had turned to her dad. 

“That the best you can do?” she asks, giving the keg a kick with the toe of her boot. 

“You’re talking to the Keg stand king of Riverdale High, bitch,” Marty replies, and Thea’s secretly excited to see all the lighthearted mocking gone from his eyes. His expression now is completely pissed off and full of hate. “Watch what you say to me unless you think you’re gonna back it up.” 

She knows it’s stupid. But Thea’s never been able to back down from a challenge, even self-imposed, and especially not when the respect of the people she’s going to call teammates relies on it. Especially when she’s planning on being football captain within the year. This is her weak rationale as she steps up so she’s toe to toe with Marty, her hands curled loosely into fists and a lopsided smirk on her face. 

In front of the football team’s astonished eyes, Thea strips off her shirt, exposing her plain black bra to the chilly air. She tosses the scrap of fabric toward the house and cracks her neck intimidatingly to one side and then the other. The circle of shirtless Bulldogs stare at her like they’ve never seen anything like it. 

“Move over,” she says to Marty. One of the other players is hoisting another keg down from the stack. She gets that same rush she had the day of tryouts, when she knew she had the position in the bag. “Let a bitch show you how it’s done.” 

* * *

“What are you doing here anyway?” Freddie follows Tom through the woods, moving up toward the road now, away from the lake. They walk at a meandering pace, not really hurrying, matching one another’s stride. The sparse cover of trees separates their trek from the main yard, where a ruckus of loud cheers suggests someone’s doing a keg stand. 

“If I’m being honest? Looking for somewhere to roll this joint.” Tom pats the upper pocket of his coat, gallantly holding up a branch for her so she can duck underneath. 

“I meant the party.” They’re walking sharply uphill, but Freddie’s keeping pace with him easily - she might be in impractical shoes, but her legs are in great shape from cheer and running. Unfortunately, they’re also bare - her shins and ankles are being cut by brambles and gnarled roots. She winces as a particularly thorny branch leaves a thin gash across her skin. “I thought you were off with the U.S. Army.” 

“I’m on leave.” 

“So you come back to Riverdale? I thought they were supposed to give you leave somewhere glamorous, like France.” She smacks away a low-hanging pine branch with more drunken gusto than necessary, not bothering to dodge it. “Hawaii?” 

“Maybe once I see combat.” Tom slows even more so that they’re side by side, turning a smile on her that makes her knees go weak. She’d forgotten he had that dimple when he smiled. 

“I still can’t believe you’d come to a high school party with your precious time off.” 

Tom smiles back down at her. “Well, there’s someone I really wanted to see.” 

Freddie’s heart feels like there’s fireworks going off inside of it. Tom was two years ahead of her in school, and she’d had a crush on him since she was seven years old. Hank was a dreamboat, sure, total small town prom king material, but he was just a _boy._ Especially now, a year of armed forces training under his belt, Tom Keller was the stuff dreams were made of - a real _man._

His arms and chest had always been muscular - Tom had been a champion wrestler throughout high school - but Freddie’s positive he must look ten times as sexy after rigorous army conditioning. She eyes the simple grey jacket he’s wearing, trying to catch a glimpse of arm or shoulder under the fabric. 

Well, there was one way to find out if he was into her. Freddie hooks her hands around her elbows, faking a subtle shiver as she pulls her shoulders in, exposing her thin bare arms. She was rarely one to play to shivering female act - but with Tom Keller around, even the staunchest of feminists were apt to make an exception. 

It works like a charm. “Are you cold?” Tom strips his jacket off, exposing a disappointingly long-sleeved shirt that nevertheless clings to every curve of his toned chest and arms. Freddie sneaks a good long look as she nods. “Here. Borrow this for a little while.” 

Drifting on the euphoria of being enclosed in his scent, Freddie can’t keep the smile off her face. Together they step out of the woods onto the top edge of Hiram’s property line, a cool expanse of well-kept lawn dividing them from the road and the parked cars. A few wrought iron park benches sit under the shade of some trees - Freddie thinks for a moment they must have stumbled into a nearby public park until she sees the gold L embossed on each curved armrest. 

“Shall we?” asks Tom, dropping onto a metal seat. Freddie sits down next to him, carefully arranging her legs so that her knees are pointed toward Tom’s body. 

“I get some of this, don’t I?” Freddie asks as she passes the joint over from the top pocket of Tom’s coat. Tom laughs. 

“The Freddie Andrews I remember was enough of a handful without it.” 

“The Freddie Andrews you remember grew up,” Freddie argues, nudging him flirtily with her knee. 

Tom laughs, popping the expertly-rolled joint between his teeth and letting it dangle from his lip as he fumbles with a lighter. “You’re still going to have to convince me.” 

Freddie grins, liking the sound of that. She watches admiringly as Tom inhales, holding the smoke in his lungs before blowing it out. There’s a sureness of adulthood to his movements - he looks out of place at this party, and yet comfortable and familiar at the same time. 

_What if this is my destiny?,_ her drunken mind asks, ignoring the fact that she’d thought the same about Thea Jones within the past twenty-four hours. The possibility hits her with a swoop of relief and joy. _We were destined to meet at this party and sit on a park bench together. He’s basically in love with me, he almost just said as much. God knows I still have feelings for him too. Why didn’t I see it before? We’re meant to be together._

“Well, for starters,” she begins, never taking her eyes off Tom’s lips, “I think I deserve it because I just broke up with someone twenty minutes ago.” 

“You’re serious.” 

“I’m serious. Down by the lake.” 

“Okay, that’s heavy.” Tom passes the joint over, watches her as she takes a drag. The smoke fills her lungs and makes her head rush, pleasantly dulling and elongating her thoughts. _Tom Keller is my destiny._ “You wanna talk about it?” 

“Nah, come on. You’re on leave from the army, and you want to hear about my boy problems? Besides, he was an asshole.” 

Tom grins. “Anyone who’d break up with you would be an asshole.” 

A dreamy smile sweeps across Freddie’s face before she can help it. She passes the joint back to Tom, shaking away the image of Thea that creeps unbidden into her mind. She focuses on Tom’s face instead, which isn’t hard to do - with the first curl of weed in her lungs his features seem to glow even brighter, until she’s positive she’s never been so in love with someone in all her life. 

“You ever fall in love with the wrong person at the wrong time?” she asks, staring into his crystal-clear eyes. “Or someone you know you shouldn’t be in love with?” 

Tom lets out a long, profound sigh, inhaling long and blowing out smoke. “Definitely.” 

“Yeah?” Freddie’s heart skips a beat. She tugs at the sleeve of his shirt. “You can tell me, you know.” 

Tom smiles sadly, puffing on the joint again. “Let’s just say I joined the army to get a girl out of my head. And the fact that I’m sitting here tonight means I still haven’t done that.” 

It feels like the breath has been sucked right out of Freddie’s body. “That’s the most romantic thing you’ve ever said,” she whispers. She leans in toward him, but Tom turns his face away at the last minute. 

"I’m getting all profound on you, aren’t I? Let’s talk about you, not me. Here.” He passes her the blunt. “Tell me what’s new at good old RHS.” 

Freddie giggles, thinking of Thea and the controversy on the football team. “Tommy, not a goddamn thing.” She wants to steer the conversation back around to how much Tom loves her, but decides to take it slow. “Hey, how long are you staying?” 

“In town? About a week, give or take.” 

“You can come see my show, then.” Freddie announces passionately. 

“No fucking way.” Tom grins enthusiastically at her. “The Fredheads have a gig?” 

“We’re playing the teen club down by the harbor.” 

“Good for you. I’m really, really, happy for you, Freddie.” He smiles honestly at her. “That’s awesome.” 

Freddie inches closer to him on the bench, leaning down so that her hair spills across his shoulder. 

“Tell me more about love, Tom.” 

“Is that a bruise?” Tom sits up, his fingers clumsy as he sweeps some hair off her cheek to where her makeup has worn off the marks from Thea’s fist. Tom’s voice goes concerned under the buzz of the weed. “Freddie, who was this guy? He didn’t hit you, did he?” 

Freddie suddenly laughs - she can’t help it. Her laugh sounds loud and fake and hysterical in the dark. Tom’s mouth curves involuntarily into a smile, but he reaches out and turns her head gently to face him. She can feel the places where his fingers land warm and heavy against her skin. 

“No guy hit me,” she promises softly. 

“You sure?” 

“What would you do if he did?” Freddie asks conversationally. She tugs on Tom’s fingers until he passes her the blunt again, definitely feeling less inhibited now. She offers a coy smile, but Tom doesn’t rise to her attempt at flirting. He frowns down at her, looking upset. “It’s nothing, Tom.” She touches the bruise with two fingers. “What if I said it was a girl?” 

Tom laughs again, awkwardly. “A girl did this? I’d say she has a hell of a right hook.” He frowns. “Who-” 

“I didn’t say a girl did it,” Freddie insists, looping her ankle behind Tom’s leg on the bench. “I said what would you say if _I_ said a girl did it.” 

“Huh?”

“Tommy, Tommy, can I tell you a secret?” Freddie wiggles closer to him, leaning in so that her lips are at his ear. Once she opens her mouth to speak, though, her courage dies. The secret tastes cold and heavy, even through her intoxication, and she hesitates with her mouth to Tom’s ear, her thoughts turning traitorously back to the sports arena parking lot, the lie about her that she’s never told anyone. She swallows hard. 

“They’re singing karaoke in the living room,” she whispers instead, and then blows in Tom’s ear. He rocks back in surprise, laughing a little. 

“And you’re proposing that I join you, I gather? No, Freddie, you’re the singer.” 

Freddie pouts, linking their ankles further. “We always do Elton John and Kiki Dee.” 

“We did that one time, and we got booed.” 

“You didn’t know the words,” she argues. 

“I still don’t.” 

Freddie puts her lips next to his ear again. “Don’t go breaking my heart. Don’t go breaking my heart. Don’t go breaking my-” 

Her fingers burrow for warmth into the pocket of her borrowed jacket, and she suddenly touches something solid and rectangular, about the size of a cassette. 

“What do you have in here?” she asks, feeling the shape of it. The box is soft and velvety under her fingers, and Tom looks adorably nervous as he tries to reach out and tug the hem of his jacket, forcing her to jump playfully away on the bench. 

“Give me that,” he tries halfheartedly, but Freddie hides the box behind her back. 

“What is it?” 

Tom reaches out and catches both her hands in his own, and Freddie relaxes immediately in his warm grip, allowing him to take the box from her fingers. He opens it gently, revealing a gorgeous gold chain necklace, ending with a gold pendant in the shape of a sunflower. The gold twinkles up at her from the crushed velvet, catching the light of the streetlamps nearby. 

“Do you like it?” Tom asks softly. 

“Do I like it?” Freddie has to force herself to blink back tears as she stares at the gold jewelry. “Tom, it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my whole life. I- ” The shape especially was a special touch - sunflowers were her favourite. 

“You can be honest,” Tom insists. “If you don’t think it’s nice, you don’t have to say so.” 

“Tom.” Freddie stares adoringly into his eyes. “I think it’s the nicest thing I’ve ever seen.” 

“And you think Sierra would like it?” 

“Sierra?” 

Tom closes the box and sets it down on one muscular thigh. “I bought it for her before I came home. I thought she’d be here tonight, so once I got my courage up I was going to go find her. I wanted to bring her this and tell her -” he swallows hard. “That I still love her.” 

Freddie feels like she’s been doused in cold water. She stands abruptly, almost falling over as a rush of blood to her head leaves her dizzy. Tom looks surprised but stays seated, possibly too stoned to react in a timely manner.

“All that talk about loving someone you left here was about Sierra?” Freddie demands, her voice embarrassingly high and clear in the still night. “She’s the person you wanted to see tonight?” 

“Yes. Yes? What are you talking about?” Tom stands up, the little box held tight in one hand. “Is everything okay?” 

“I’m fine. I’m fine, Tom. Here.” She shrugs off his jacket, throwing it in a heap on the bench. “Give this to Sierra too.” 

Tom squints at her, nonplussed and confused. “Freddie, are you mad?" 

“Don’t go breaking my heart, you dumb asshole!” she yells, and kicks him in the shin. It probably does more damage to her bare toe than to his leg - her toenail hurts, and the motion jostles a blister against the side of her sandal. For the millionth time that night, her vision is eclipsed by flooding tears. You’d think after losing a sibling you’d learn more than anyone to cry only when it really mattered, but that was far from her reality. 

The bewildered look on Tom’s face is tearing her heart in two. Forcing herself not to run, Freddie turns and stares hard at the treeline, willing the tears back into her eyes. “I’m going now,” she says, wiping her nose on the back of her hand. “Don’t follow me.” 

“Freddie, I don’t-” 

Freddie tunes him out. There’s rage swelling in her chest along with the sadness, and it burns hot and spitting angry throughout her veins, keeping her warm even jacketless. She marches angrily along the dirt road back to the front door of the party, her jaw set and her sandals slapping hard against the gravel. When she realizes Tom isn’t following her, she feels even worse. 

The front entryway is packed, and Freddie pushes her way through the crowd to get to the kitchen. The floor of the house is an unmitigated disaster - what looks like the entire contents of a bookshelf have spilled onto the ground and are being callously stomped over by the junior class. Had it been anyone else’s house Freddie would have worried for them, but knowing Hiram had a whole fleet of maids to clean his shit up made her smack her foot down hard on the spine of a hardcover Moby Dick until she heard it snap. 

Finally reaching the bar, she pours herself a double shot of tequila and knocks it back out of a paper cup. Turning against the flow of the crowd, Freddie shoves her way into the living room, hopping up onto the white leather couch without bothering to kick off her shoes and grabbing the abandoned mic from the karaoke machine. 

“This one’s for all the people with broken hearts,” she screams angrily into the mic, pacing the length of the leather sofa. “This is for all the people who have been fucked over, who have had their hearts stomped on, and-” 

“Okay, but what are you singing?” Darryl Doiley asks with impatience, manning the karaoke machine by the stairs. Freddie doesn’t answer. She catches a sudden glimpse of Hank slinking along the back wall toward the door, and is struck with another wave of fury. 

“This is not for you, Hank Gomez!” She screams across the room, a feedback squeal cutting through her words. “Don’t think I’m talking about you, I’m not! This isn’t even about you, this has nothing to do with you at all, you are NOTHING TO ME!” 

“There she is!” Alice’s triumphant voice suddenly sounds above the ruckus. Freddie tears her gaze away from Hank to see her best friend dragging Hal toward her by the hand, murder in her eyes. 

“Shit,” says Freddie into the mic. She looks left and right for an escape route, her mind running frantically. “Um, thanks everyone,” she says into the mic, unaware that she’d accidentally bumped the switch to turn it off. “You’ve been a great crowd. Goodnight.” She drops the mic onto the couch cushions and rushes toward the plate glass door leading to the deck. 

“No, you don’t!” Alice yells, and suddenly Freddie’s being tackled hard onto her stomach, Alice rushing at her and seizing her hard around the waist, flattening her onto the couch. Freddie struggles uselessly in her grip, but Alice is holding her too tightly to move. “You smell like weed!” she announces as she pins Freddie’s arms behind her back, her voice a disturbingly accurate imitation of Freddie’s mother. 

“Shit, Alice, you should join the football team,” says Darryl - the traitor has grabbed Freddie’s other arm and is helping Alice and Hal pull her up to her feet, Alice’s grip vice-like on her elbow. He laughs. “I hear they’ll let anyone on these days.” 

Freddie doesn’t remember doing it, but she suddenly rips her other hand out of Darryl’s grip and punches him directly in the nose. The pain in her knuckles is her first awareness of hitting him - Darryl screams and Alice screams and Hal scoops her up from around the waist and carries her backward away from the scene, the crowd surging in around them to get a glimpse of the action. Darryl’s bleeding onto the white couch. 

“We’re going!” Hal keeps shouting by her ear, his arms pressing painfully against Freddie’s hips as he pins her tight to his body. Alice races up beside them, hers and Hal’s coats tossed over one arm. 

“I thought weed was supposed to make you mellow,” Hal pants, carrying Freddie through the narrow front hall and onto the porch. She’s thrashing furiously in his grip like an angry cat, her long hair in her eyes. 

“Freddie, cool it!” Alice yells. Freddie turns her head to tell her that she was happy she’d hit Darryl and she’d do it again, when her gaze lands on a group of people climbing the stairs of the porch from the side yard. 

She lets herself go limp and slides out of Hal’s grip, landing on her feet. Hal grabs her arm, but otherwise he lets her stand as the group comes closer, revealing Thea Jones among their number. She’s in black jeans and a wet tank top, her hair slicked down and her cheeks flushed with drink. She’s ten times as beautiful as Freddie remembers her. 

They see one another in the same moment, eyes locking and their faces flooded with shock. “You said you weren’t coming!” Freddie accuses her, combing her hair with her fingers to get it out of her eyes. 

“You said YOU weren’t coming!” Thea retorts. 

“She’s leaving,” Alice announces firmly, steering Freddie toward Hal’s parked car. “Party’s over, Freddie.” 

Freddie stares over her shoulder at Thea as Hal and Alice wrestle her into the backseat, letting herself be moved like a doll. Alice squeezes in beside her and Hal gets behind the wheel, but Freddie stays glued to the window, staring through the glass at the lakehouse. The car pulls away, but Freddie keeps staring at the place where Thea’s disappeared. 

“Freddie?” Alice’s hand is in her hair, on her shoulder. “Hey. Look at me.” 

“You missed the turn,” Freddie speaks up, pointing out the window as Pop’s neon sign blurs past them. The car bumps over the railroad tracks, jostling her against her friend. 

Hal eyes them in the rearview mirror. “I could go for a burger.” 

“Drive, Hal,” Alice replies. “I think Freddie needs to go home.” 

Freddie lays her head down against Alice’s shoulder. She feels suddenly cold, hollow, confused. 

“Tom Keller doesn’t love me,” she whispers dejectedly into Alice’s neck. 

Alice combs some of Freddie’s tangled hair off her face. “What?” 

“Forget it.” Thea’s face is burned into her mind, her pale skin and big dark eyes, the crease in her forehead as her lips fell open in surprise. She could still feel those eyes burning into her skin. Her conversation with Tom feels as far away as school on Monday, yet as she flexes her fingers in her lap she finds herself imagining the gold chain of Sierra’s necklace. 

She wonders if anyone’s ever given Thea jewelry. Suddenly she wants to, more than anything in the world. Freddie rubs her eyes with her bloody knuckles until she sees spots. 

“Hey. I don’t know what went down between you and Hank tonight, but I do know this.” Alice cups Freddie’s cheek and turns her face toward her in the backseat. “You are the most amazing person I know. You are the toughest, smartest, most ferocious fucking _bitch_ at this school. You don’t need any boy - you don’t need any _one_. Fuck everyone else.” She licks her thumb and wipes a smudge of blood off Freddie’s nose. “You’re amazing. Got it?” 

A lump fills Freddie’s throat, but she can’t cry anymore - she won’t. Instead she shoves Alice’s shoulder, forcing herself to smile. 

“Alice, would you still love me if-” 

Alice’s blue eyes flicker to her face, waiting for Freddie to speak. Freddie thinks of whispering it in her ear, the way she’d almost done with Tom. But her fear wins out. 

“If?” Alice prompts. 

“I don’t know,” she lies, leaning her head down on Alice’s lap and kicking her shoes off at last. “I forgot. Wake me up when we’re home.” 


	10. Chapter 10

Freddie wakes up into a blaze of glaring light. Her father, Artie, is standing in the doorway of her attic bedroom, one hand on the switch that controls the now-blinding light above her head. If he feels remotely remorseful for having awakened his very hungover daughter, he doesn’t show it. Freddie slits her eyes open to look at the clock and immediately buries her head back in the pillow. 7 on the dot. She’d crept home at just past three. 

“Downstairs in five, please, Freddie. Your mother and I need to have a little chat with you.” 

Freddie rolls over, roused by the curtness of his tone. She cracks her eyes open again, the blinding light filtered somewhat (but not enough) by the curtain of messy hair that lays over her face, but her father has already withdrawn from the doorway and is headed back down the stairs. 

A chat. _Fuck._ A talk or even a _discussion_ she could handle - but chat was parent-speak for _you’re in deep shit now, young lady_. She wonders what she’d done this time. 

Freddie drags herself out of bed, stepping carelessly over last night’s party outfit on her floor and sighing with relief when she swats the light switch off. Her bedroom is in the attic of the house - the wood walls and slanted wood ceiling, dotted with sports pennants and polaroid photos of her friends, are a haphazard contrast to the white-and-floral painted dresser and bed frame - her mother’s last attempt, way back in childhood, to nurture a girlish daughter. 

Stupidly, she can’t help assuming that it was her drinking her parents wanted to talk to her about - Artie and Bunny allowed her a surprising amount of freedom on weekends, understanding that it was a condition of how popular she was with the junior class, but she supposed coming home through her bedroom window at three in the morning was pushing it. It’s not until she’s trudging down from the attic in her sweatpants and Riverdale Athletics shirt, two fingers pressed to the drilling hangover in her temple, that the second possibility hits her with a frightening swoop, almost causing her to slip and fall down two flights of stairs. 

No. They couldn’t know about Thea. Could they? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time two teenagers had been found out after a tryst at Miller’s Point - though clumsy cheating in the ranks of high school hierarchy was nowhere near as serious as what Freddie and Thea had done. And then there had been the parking lot of the sports arena - they hadn’t even bothered to make sure the area was clear. Freddie hadn’t even looked behind her. 

Nauseous in a way that has nothing to do with last night’s tequila, Freddie swallows hard and slinks down the staircase to the kitchen, her legs shaking beneath her. 

The first glimpse of her parents’ faces erases her last shred of hope. Artie is sitting at the breakfast table, stone-faced and angry, but it’s the expression on her mom’s that makes the bottom fall out of Freddie’s stomach. She’s obviously been crying hard - Bunny’s eyes are red and watery, and her face is shiny with tears. As soon as she looks up and their eyes meet, her mother lets out a wail and buries her face in a tissue. 

Freddie feels frozen to the spot, her tongue dry and useless. If it were any other day, and last night had been any other party, she’d simply lean on her uncanny knack of talking her way out of trouble. Only there’s no words for this one. This was, quite possibly, the worst thing she’d ever done and got caught for, and she was completely unprepared to face up to it. 

Her mind flips to Thea and Joanie, and though she’d felt a rush of hatred for Thea’s old flame back in the storage closet, she suddenly understands why her way out had seemed so compelling. There’s suddenly nothing she wants more than to lay the blame on the new girl - to sob about being corrupted, to bury herself in her parents' arms again and have everything go away. 

But Freddie wasn’t that girl. Freddie was old enough to own up to what she’d done, and she was going to take responsibility for her own shit, consequences be damned. She stiffens her spine and resolves to hold her own. It probably wouldn’t help either of them much, but maybe she could say it was all her fault. That Thea hadn’t done anything wrong. She’d made her bed, and she’d lie in it, and maybe it would be enough to get Thea off scott-free. 

Artie stands up and slowly walks toward her. 

I messed up, Freddie rehearses in her head. I know. I’m sorry. Her stomach is tight with uncertainty and dread, and the black hardcover Bible next to her fathers’ plate keeps drawing her eye. She isn’t exactly sure what God had to say about her issue - but she had an uneasy feeling that he didn’t condone kissing girls in empty stadium parking lots. 

“Your mother,” begins Artie, “has been beside herself all night. Do you have _anything_ to say for yourself?” 

Freddie stays prudently quiet, forcing herself to look her father in the eyes. People often said she looked like a female version of Artie - she had the same brown eyes, the same cheekbones and nose and wide forehead. Right now her father’s eyes are shot through with red veins, and his brow is folded into a million angry lines. Freddie swallows hard. 

Artie glares at the empty seat at the kitchen table. “Why don’t you sit down, Winnifred.” 

It’s not a suggestion. Freddie lowers herself into the seat, not daring to look at her mom. Artie looms over her for a moment, radiating anger, and then seats himself back at the head of the table. 

Freddie wishes her father would just get it over with - her heart felt like it was about to burst. What happened now? What would they do to her? Would they have to move, like Thea had? Leave everything? 

_If they kick me out I’ll run away with her_ , Freddie thinks tempestuously, even though there’s an undercurrent of nausea inside her that keeps the words from truly landing. She thinks them, but she can’t make them real. Whatever happened, she wasn’t ready for it. 

“Your carelessness amazes me, Freddie,” her father roars across the table. “Your brother _died_ from a motorbike accident. It’s enough that you have no disregard for _our_ rules, for the letter of the law - riding a bike without a license is _illegal_ , by the way - but to see you be so cavalier with your own safety, with your brother’s memory - is _humiliating_ , to say the least.” 

What? Freddie stares at him, her jaw open, trying to readjust. An uneasy peal of hope unfurls in her chest - was it possible they didn’t know? 

“Imagine our surprise,” Artie yells, “When Mrs. Malloy from down the street told us she’d seen you riding a motorbike through the centre of town. Alone. Do you know how many innocent people you could have killed? Do you have any idea what would have happened if you’d crashed? I should think you’d have _some_ idea, but if there’s anything that this incident has proven to me it’s that you’re a complete _idiot_ with absolutely no common sense!” 

Bunny starts crying harder. Freddie takes her eyes away from her father to glance toward her mom, and Artie hits the table with his fist so hard and abruptly that the breakfast dishes rattle. 

“Freddie!” he barks. “Do you have anything to say about the complete disrespect you’ve shown your mother and I?” 

It was the motorbike. They were upset about the motorbike. They had no idea who owned it. A wave of relief washes over Freddie, replaced by a wave of shame that floods prickly and hot from her head to her feet. She feels dizzy and lightheaded. “It won’t happen again,” she promises in her most sincere voice. 

“Won’t happen again! I should think not!” Artie isn’t done yelling, his voice crescendoing up until it fills the room. “Until you learn to have a modicum of respect for your parents and the SLIGHTEST regard for other people, you are grounded! Indefinitely!” 

Maybe it’s the stress of the morning, but something snaps inside Freddie as he father slaps his fist again on the table to punctuate his words. It’s the first time he or her mother have bothered to discipline her - to parent her at all - since Oscar died, and something about it grates her raw. 

“You haven’t cared what I do for the past six months,” Freddie hurls back at him. “Why is it any different now? _Now_ you decide to act like my parents?” 

Artie looks absolutely shocked at her daring. “Young lady-” he begins, his voice shaking with barely-contained anger, but Freddie isn’t done. 

“Or is it because the bike makes it about Oscar. Oscar who’s your favourite. Is that why you’ve finally remembered you have another kid?” 

Artie’s voice is cold as ice - he sucks in a breath sharp and short as frost. “Frankly it’s shocking to me, Freddie, that your brother’s death means so little to you.” 

Freddie reacts as though he’d slapped her. She pushes her chair back from the table, her eyes filling with tears and her hands shaking. Her father had no right to say that to her. Her father had no right to pretend he had any idea what Ozzie meant to her. 

Freddie stands up. She wants to scream a last parting insult - I hate you, or _fuck you_ if she was feeling really brave, _how dare you speak about him like that_ , maybe, but all that comes out when she opens her mouth is a strangled, furious sob. She seizes her chair to compensate and throws it over onto the linoleum floor, the wood crashing hard against the ground in a din that makes her mother clasp her hands over her ears. 

Then Freddie does what she does best and she _runs_ \- best girl runner on the track team since fourth grade - up the stairs and into Oscar’s bedroom, slamming the door with all her might and swiping a whole shelf of Oscar’s trophies and trinkets to hit with a cacophony onto the floor. 

* * *

Thea wakes up hungover, sick to her stomach, and happier than she’s been in months. It takes two tries to get out of bed - her vision swims like a sickly tilt-a-whirl, the whole trailer a swirl of colour as she white-knuckles the edge of her mattress with sweat-damp palms. She has to swallow down hot shooting bile in her throat, doubling over momentarily to press her elbows to her knees and her palms to her eyes, grunting a string of truly enjoyable curse words as she wills herself not to throw up on her own feet. 

“C’mon,” she mutters to herself, feeling her way along the wall to the bathroom, her skin feeling hot and tight and the light transforming into millions of dizzy, blinking black spots before her eyes. “You got this.” 

She almost face-plants into the sink - the floor seems to be moving under her feet more than she’s walking, like her trailer had become a boat in the middle of the night and set sail. She spits into the porcelain but doesn’t vomit - though the act makes the taste in her mouth ten times worse, turning her stomach. Thea cranks the tap, tipping her head upside-down to drink greedily from the stream of water. When she’s had her fill she flips her head back upright again, staring into the mirror from under her dripping bangs. 

She’s in last night’s clothes - her jeans and tank top are grimy with sweat and booze and god knows what else. There are dark crevasses under her eyes: her face was that of someone who had partied hard, and well. A line crosses her cheek from the edge of her pillow, and every inch of her smells like beer. 

All in all, not bad for her first real party. Not bad at all. 

Thea had always known she’d be able to drink like a sailor - her father being the way he was, that shit was in her blood. The few times she’d indulged herself at the dive bars her father had been frequenting since she was six years old had reassured her that she had a hearty tolerance for the stuff. She’d never attempted quite the volume of beer she’d downed that night, but hell, there was a first time for everything. 

And fuck, it felt good. 

What blurry memories she has of last night are almost as satisfying as a football win. After she’d done a perfect keg stand and handed Marty Mantle his ass on a plate, Thea had spent the rest of the party in tentative competition-cum-camaraderie with the other football players - most of whom who had loosened their opinions toward her considerably once she’d proven her ability to chug beer and break things with the best of them. 

The thrill that had raced through her blood at keeping toe-to-toe with them all night was just as good as any drug high. It had been messy and satisfying and mindless and easy and felt _a-fucking-mazing_ , and the fact that most of the players had stopped treating her any different than they would another guy meant that she could actually enjoy it. She felt confident that she had actually earned the respect of a few of them - and she was willing to put in the work to make sure it extended to the rest. If this went on, she could take her chance to focus on nothing this year than being a stupid jock. 

_I had a better time than I would have with Miss Priss anyway_ , she thinks, trying to banish the memory of Freddie on that front step, in a satiny catalogue-page top and skirt that made her look thin and cold and vulnerable. But her scorn is wishful thinking - her heart still starts pumping when she thinks of the brunette, and the way their faces had collided in that parking lot leaves an indelible memory that’s impossible to push out. 

_Miss Priss. Right, like a few days ago you weren’t obsessing about how fun and exciting she was. Sure, Thea._

Freddie was annoyingly hard to pin down - she’d steal Thea’s motorbike from under her and rip out of the school parking lot at a hundred miles an hour only to show up to a party dressed for a Miss America pageant. Thea couldn’t tell which side of her was the fake. All she knew was that she couldn’t get her out of her thoughts without a half-dozen beers in her system. Freddie was in her too deep. 

_All the more reason to drink_ , she thinks sourly, shoving her palms off the sink and straightening up before the mirror, crossing her arms over her chest to clumsily pull her shirt over her head. Her body is beginning to feel tense and reverbery, the way it always does when she thinks of Freddie for too long, and she hurries to get into the shower and tune the feelings out. 

Thea stands in the lukewarm shower spray for as long as the hot water lasts, forcing herself to focus on her future as one of the guys - football and binge drinking and nothing more complicated than that. After what she’d been through back in Midvale, it sounded like heaven. 

_A few more parties like that, and I’ll get her out of my system_ , Thea promises herself when the water runs cold, wrapping herself quickly in a threadbare towel and savouring the dregs of her hangover with perverse satisfaction. She eyes herself in the cracked mirror, nausea creeping slow and sour in her throat. 

_I hope._

* * *

For the first time since Freddie had started dating Hank, the phone doesn’t ring once all weekend. Not her boyfriend, not a friend inviting her to Pop’s, not Tom with an apology, not Alice recalling some embarrassing thing she’d done last night, not even Penelope hounding her for gossip. For someone who had once begged her parents for her own personal phone line - and won the case because of the sheer volume of calls she was getting - the silence was stark and noticeable. But for once in her life, Freddie relishes in it. 

She spends most of the weekend on the floor of Oscar’s room, gluing toy soldiers to her diorama with a focus that borders on mania. By Saturday evening it’s done - a Great War battle scene rendered in painstaking detail, trees whittled, trenches hollowed, splashes of red-brown paint congealed in pools of blood. In between she lays on Oscar’s bed for long swathes of time, watches the ceiling fan turn and retreats to some nostalgic border half-remembered from childhood - a place where the shaft of sun that fell across the bed from the closed window could have been summer, where any moment her brother’s footsteps could come pounding up the stairs. 

Church is non-negotiable on Sunday - Artie and Bunny seem to have got it through their heads that she’d run off and find another motorbike to crash as soon as she was left alone - but they can’t make her dress up for it. Freddie wears the same track pants and sweaty t-shirt that she’d lived in all weekend, unshowered, perversely pleased with her bare face and greasy hair. She doesn’t meet her father’s eyes as he reads the sermon - instead she stares stubbornly above him at the stained glass windows she has memorized from childhood, the sun shining ruby-red through those panels that were meant to depict blood. In her head she runs through song lyrics, writing without a notepad, tuning out her father’s indictment of sin. 

For the rest of Sunday she plucks at her guitar, rearranging a setlist for the gig that she might not even get to play, depending on Artie’s definition of _indefinitely_. With a graphite pencil stolen from Oscar’s desk (OSCAR ANDREWS is stamped in the side, a relic of his first or second grade) she edits the song that she’d written as fast as she could last week, almost immediately after bursting in the door on the day she and Thea had met. When she looks up from her pad, the yellow paper stained with scribbling, it’s already dark. 

Monday morning comes around both too quickly and painfully slow. For the first time in a long time Freddie opts to sleep in instead of bothering with makeup, changing into a clean pair of track pants and a long-sleeved baseball shirt - one of the outfits Hank had openly despised. 

_No one looks good in track pants, Freddie,_ he used to lecture her. _They’re not real clothes._

In retrospect, maybe she should have seen the signs that Hank wasn’t straight as an arrow. 

Freddie’s mother drives her to school with a stern promise that she’ll be there at the end of the day to pick her up - losing car privileges was part of her daughter’s punishment, and Freddie had a track record for “forgetting” her detentions and trooping off to the Choklit shoppe with her friends after school anyway. When Freddie walks in the front door there’s a crowd of students several feet thick around the bulletin board next to the gymnasium, where the names of the new first and second-string quarterbacks were listed. 

Freddie pushes her way through the crowd, the diorama held protectively against her chest, stopping short in front of the list as her heart crashes into the front of her ribs. 

**FORSYTHIA JONES** is printed in black-and-white on the top spot.


	11. PART TWO

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I WAS SUPPOSED TO PUBLISH THIS ON HALLOWEEN!!!!!!!!!! briana im sorry pls accept it 10 days late. i hope it is still halloween in your heart and it is still on theme.

**October 31st, 1991.**

“Jones! Look alive!” 

Thea turns just in time to leap for the football sailing over her head. Her hands brush leather and she manages to snag the ball, but pulls it into her chest too late to dodge the blur of blue and white that rams into her with full force. Harry Clayton flies over her head as she hits the ground, sprawling out on the white line in a tangle of limbs as Coach Kleats blasts his whistle hard. 

“You’re slacking!” Kleats chastises his players as they jump up, Harry brushing his knees off and extending a hand to Thea to pull her to her feet. Blasting his whistle again in dismay, the head coach motions for his sweaty, restless players to huddle into a circle around him. 

“I have no doubt that you all have Halloween plans this evening,” he lectures, looking from one face to the next, “but until four PM I expect your minds to be on football. You come here to practice and give your all. Quarterfinals are in two weeks, and this team is nowhere near in championship shape!” 

Thea nods dutifully with the rest of her teammates, but her attention has slid off across the field to where the cheerleaders are practicing in a flurry of blue and gold uniforms. She can pick out Freddie from the distance, but the brunette has her back to them and doesn’t notice her gaze. Thea swallows involuntarily and forces her eyes back to the coach, whose jaw tightens as he regards his team. 

“Run it again!” He orders, sending his players back to the end zone. “I want to see some hustle this time!” 

By the time Kleats is satisfied enough to let them troop off to the showers, Thea’s mud-splattered and bone-tired. She tunes out the loud conversation around her about whose Halloween party they’re going to, and drags her bag off in the direction of the girls’ change room. 

Thea doesn’t glance at Freddie as she walks in, even though the cheerleaders are already mostly dressed: chatting and blow-drying in a semi-circle close to the door. She heads directly for the last shower stall and strips down behind the curtain, savouring the warm water and the hard shower pressure. 

Even the boys at Riverdale complained about the gym showers, but they were a cut above what Thea was used to at home - a leaky, mildew-rotten faucet that only sometimes worked. Twisting a towel self-consciously around herself, she heads for the corner of the change room she’d claimed as her own, where she could dress with her back to the others. She doesn’t make eye contact with anyone, doesn’t dare even glance anywhere but her feet, yet the occasional whisper or murmur of concern still passes through the other girls while she’s in the room. Thea pulls on a plain black bra and a white tanktop and tries not to let on that her skin is crawling from their disdain. 

She and Freddie have their routine down to a science. Freddie leaves first, making a right turn down the L shaped corridor that housed the history department and the bank of lockers she and Alice used. Thea heads straight out the back gym doors and catches up with her in the parking lot, where their vehicles would be parked close - but not next - to one another. 

“How was practice?” one of them always asks. 

“Rough,” says Thea today. “You?” 

“It was fine.” Sometimes Freddie touches her, a friendly hand on the arm, a barely-there brush of skin as she climbs up into the truck bed or slips past her, but she doesn’t today. She grins though, bright and friendly and achingly lovely. “Have a good Halloween. Be safe.” 

Thea smiles and nods and Freddie turns on the radio, Thea swings her leg over her own bike and fastens her helmet, and one of them peels out of the parking lot first. It’s Freddie today. Thea sits on her bike for just a second too long and watches her for a moment more than is prudent. 

That’s all. That’s all they ever do after practices, though sometimes Thea looks forward to it the entire day. 

In the wake of Freddie’s parents finding out about her joyride on Thea’s bike, the two of them found it utterly impossible to see one another outside of school. Freddie was grounded indefinitely, constantly under her parents’ supervision, and worst of all, forbidden to play in her band’s upcoming gig. This she communicated to Thea through furious whispers in class and folded scraps of notebook paper, raging at lunch over wax-wrapped sandwiches that she continued to split down the middle with Thea even though she now packed two every day. 

Freddie had somehow sweet-talked Alice and an uptight-looking redheaded boy into swapping partners in last period chemistry, and Thea and Freddie now sat knee-to-knee on cold aluminum stools in the back row of the chemistry lab, mixing solutions and jotting down notes on thick yellow legal pads while they tried as much as possible to both touch one another and refrain from doing so. Because their contact was so limited, every moment became both precious and electric - the simple motion of Freddie’s denim-clad calf rubbing against hers could drive Thea wild for hours at the back of the class. 

Freddie was impressed by Thea’s proficiency in the subject - Thea tried not to take offense at the fact that Freddie had clearly expected her grades to suffer by swapping partners. Chemistry had always made sense to Thea, illogically so, and she ended up being the one performing most of the experiments while Freddie seemed more apt to break a beaker or haphazardly toss dangerous amounts of chemicals into their mixture. 

In first period they shared homeroom English, Thea daydreaming while Freddie worked, her eyes fixed dreamily to the back of the other girl’s head, charting the positions of moles and freckles and wishing privately to put her mouth on them. Occasionally the teacher would wheel out the TV to show them some movie version of their required reading, and on these days Freddie would hurriedly scoot her chair next to Thea’s desk, their hearts beating quick in the semi-darkness as they agonized over their proximity and the impossibility of being as close as they would have liked. 

They watched a lot of movies in October, and eventually Freddie’s thigh drifted against Thea’s, her arm sometimes stretching out across the back of Thea’s chair, almost touching but never close enough. Once they had hooked their index fingers together in the space between their seats, and Thea, never one to be impressed by simple gestures, had lost track of the movie for almost forty minutes, her world reduced to that tiny surface of skin against hers and the beating of her own heart. 

The real treat was school assemblies - if the school was called down to a presentation in the auditorium they would slip away from their respective classes and hunker down at the very back of the room, in an almost-invisible barrier created by the orchestra supply room and the shadow of a balcony. There they would sit side-by-side in the darkness and do absolutely nothing - thighs touching, fingers brushing, hearts pounding, mouths dry, both afraid to speak and both staring ahead of them in rapture and agony. Sometimes Freddie would bend her head to whisper some joke at the presenter’s expense, and sometimes Thea would laugh and nudge her in response, but what was more communicable was the frustration and absense of something so tangible between them that they could almost taste it. 

They never did anything. Paranoid about being found out, they limited their contact by some unspoken rule to assemblies, and their shared classes and lunch period, permitting themselves only that brief moment in the parking lot after their respective practices to speak publicly. In the halls they acted friendly, but not too friendly -  _ best friends _ had rumours spread about them, and neither of them could afford it. 

Freddie’s parents had timed how long it took her to get home from practice and expected her at _ exactly  _ that time, so stealing even a second once the bell rang was impossible. Breaks in between classes were equally difficult - suspicion already hung around Thea like a cloud, and the thought of kissing Freddie on school property, as desirable as it was, carried with it the unmistakable threat of danger. 

It was hell. Yet somehow those long, stupid golden fall weeks were more poignant and meaningful than anything she could remember with Joanie in Midvale, though she’d never admit it even to herself. What they were doing for now was painful but safe - a stupid barely-crush that never escalated into danger, dismissable as stupid and superficial, just experimentation, a lapse in judgement, no feelings involved. As long as they didn’t touch, Thea could go on pretending Freddie meant nothing to her, and she intended to do exactly that until she willed her feelings out of existence. 

Then the Pearl Jam concert had rolled around. 

Freddie, who until then had been uncharacteristically compliant in her punishment, put up a convincing fight to her parents about the unfairness of taking away something she’d won in a contest and that she had to share with someone else. Her mother had threatened to only permit it if she bought Artie a third ticket to chaperone them, and Artie had had every intention of making good on the threat until he realized he’d have to do exactly that. So with strict orders to come back immediately after the final set, the Andrews had turned Freddie loose in her brother’s truck for a single night. 

The night should have been the build-up of all the unbearable sexual tension that had been growing between them at school, but the car ride there was nothing but friendly. Freddie had picked her up at the trailer park, Thea booking it into the passenger seat and slamming the door before her father could get a good look at who she was with. Freddie was bubbly with excitement and her new-found freedom, grinning all the way there and talking a mile a minute, ruffling her hair in the breeze from the open window. Thea, mostly thanks to the half-joint she’d smoked with the guys after practice, was relaxed and pliant, nodding along to Freddie’s stories about the other concerts she’d been to at this venue and the time she’d slept on the ground outside with Alice to make sure they were first in line to buy tickets. They sang along to every song on the album, the windows open to let the music and their loud, off-key voices stream out into the night. 

Then they were inside, and Thea was leading her to the mosh pit, black X’s stamped across both of their hands to keep them from buying drinks. Freddie had never been in a pit before but was dying to try it, and though Thea had cautioned her to keep to the outside, bouncing off the backs of broader and older boys, it only took one song before she was shoving her way inside to the middle. Thea had no choice but to race in after her, throwing elbows and full-bodied shoving other people away from her, keeping Freddie safe like some kind of mosh pit guardian angel. 

The first forty-five minutes of the concert were ecstasy, and for a square Freddie took to moshing like she’d been doing it all her life. They lost themselves in the light and rhythm, screaming the lyrics to the songs, smashing into one another and other people, blurry off the two-six of vodka that Alice had procured for them and that Freddie had been saving in the glove compartment of Oscar’s truck. 

Then Thea had let her guard down for a millisecond and let Freddie take a flying elbow to the face that landed with an audible snap and sent blood gushing down her chin like a waterfall. 

“FUCK!” Thea had screamed above the music, already picturing what Freddie’s parents were going to do to her when their daughter came home with her nose broken in ten places. Grabbing Freddie by her sweaty hand, she’d tried to drag her out of the surging crowd with all her strength, but even gushing blood, Freddie had been having the time of her life and was resisting her. 

They ended up in the filthy bathroom once Thea had wrenched her out of the crowd, sitting Freddie up on the counter with a wad of toilet paper as she ascertained with relief that nothing was broken. Freddie’s teeth were stained with blood and she kept laughing in Thea’s face and trying to wriggle back off the countertop, her cheeks flushed and her eyes sparkly. Even soaked in blood, she’d never looked prettier, and try as she might to hold onto the seriousness of the situation, Thea kept grinning. 

“You’re a psycho!” Thea had screamed in her face, making Freddie laugh louder. “You’re fucking crazy!” 

Freddie was raring to get back to the pit before the bleeding had even stopped, trying to drag Thea out of the room, laughing wildly through her fistful of tissues and crowing about how much fun she was having and how she loved the song that was playing. Thea had yanked her back on instinct, pulling her into her chest so that they both stumbled into the counter. 

And it was there, Freddie’s wrist in her bloody hand, their faces inches apart in front a mirror that seemed to distort time and space, that Thea had completely lost her mind all over again. She leaned in without a moment’s hesitation and kissed Freddie’s bloody lips like it was what she was born to do, like they weren’t standing in a public room in a very small town where anyone could walk in and see them. 

“Thea,” Freddie had whispered when she came up for air - not in a warning way, either, in a loving tone that scared her shitless. So Thea had done the only thing she knew how - she’d shut down. 

“I didn’t mean to do that,” she said coldly, her eyes on the floor, refusing to look her friend in the eye. “That was a mistake. Tilt your head forward and pinch your nostrils together until it stops bleeding.” 

_ Don’t get hurt. You’re going to get hurt. Don’t fucking let her do this to you.  _ The thoughts had warred in her mind like crashing cymbals as she’d led Freddie out the bathroom door and back into the venue. But stepping out of the back room they’d hesitated for just a moment as their eyes adjusted to the light, and as the music slowed into one of the band’s slower songs and the light show pulsed slower and darker on the stage Freddie’s hand had slipped completely into hers, their fingers lacing and their palms kissing together. 

Time had stretched in that moment, a million seconds coalescing into one, and then Freddie had given her hand a squeeze that seemed to understand her better than anyone else ever has, and had let go. But for that one long moment, all Thea’s fears had ceased to exist, and the lapse in the wall she’d built up felt less like fault and more like a gift. 

The rest of the concert could have been awesome or terrible, she wouldn’t have noticed. Then they were in the parking lot, and it was well past midnight, and then they were driving home and the streetlights were streaking into yellow light in the black sky, and the truck never wavered or sped despite Freddie having swallowed most of the vodka on an empty stomach. 

Freddie’s house had sat dark and empty when they’d pulled up - Thea had never questioned why she wasn’t being taken home. Freddie had shown her a well-worn route up the elm tree and across the gutter to her brother’s bedroom window, and they’d tumbled silently into the quiet blue room, Freddie climbing immediately onto the bed and patting the mattress next to her. 

“Lay down,” she’d urged, and Thea had been powerless to resist her, moving as if in a trance. Freddie had wrapped an arm around her waist, her hair falling into Thea’s mouth like spun toffee as she bent to kiss her clavicle, and then they were kissing lazily with their fingers laced, Thea’s spine prickling with the fear of being discovered, though it wasn’t enough to keep her from enjoying it. 

“Stay here,” Freddie had begged when Thea had tried to climb out of the sheets, headed for the window, catching her by the wrist and tugging her back toward the mattress. Hypnotized, Thea sank back onto the soft duvet and let Freddie rest her head on her chest, the two of them curled together in the way she used to lie with Joanie, the way that had made Joanie’s mother scowl with hatred and declare that  _ girls didn’t lay together like that.  _

Freddie had fallen asleep first - Thea was too tense to drift off, her mouth drying up every time the house settled, certain they were about to be caught. But she wasn’t scared enough to withdraw from the bed, to unlock her legs from the place where Freddie’s knee had slotted into her groin like a puzzle piece meant to fit. 

She waited until the first rays of dawn were hitting the sky, and then she’d lifted the dead weight of Freddie’s head from her chest and kissed her gently on the temple before climbing back down the elm tree and walking back to the Southside. The pre-dawn light had elongated every shadow, and Thea had shivered in her light jacket, drawing it tight around her as her whole body buzzed with a mixture of arousal and fear. 

The next day Freddie was back to being grounded, and they sat stiffly in awkward auditorium chairs side by side, watching a video about the damage that cigarettes did to your developing lungs. Thea’s walls were back up, her head on straight, but it didn’t mean much. Freddie could unzip her heart and step inside without even trying. 

Now it was Halloween, the Junior class spreading out tonight between a series of much-anticipated costume parties. Freddie, still grounded, was committed to candy detail with her parents and had resigned herself to missing the fun. 

Thea’s teammates were trying to egg her into joining them at the rowdiest kegger at Marty Mantle’s house, but she was still on the fence about showing up. If her dad was home it would be a convenient means of escape, but if he was out - and he was out more and more often with the Serpents lately - she’d have the trailer to herself. It had been a long day, and a night of stuffing her face in front of a horror marathon without worrying about Forsythe Jones’ wrath sounded like celebration enough. 

Her father had given her a hearty shove into the wall earlier in the month when he was in one of his angry moods, but otherwise it had been almost two long months since he’d laid a hand on her, and the scarring that had once littered her back from a particularly awful night back home was beginning to heal. Thea was tentatively considering the possibility that they’d left the abuse behind in Midvale, or at least that her dad was willing to play nice for awhile. The argument didn’t hold a lot of water, but she still clung to the tenuous hope of a new leaf. It was all she had. 

Regardless of her surprisingly positive recent track record, her whole body relaxes when she steps into the trailer and finds it empty. Pumping a fist of victory in the air, Thea shucks off her shoes and socks at the front door and pads carelessly into the kitchen to dump herself a massive bowl of cereal. Sitting down with a package of pepperoni sticks and a sleeve of Reese’s pilfered from the cafeteria vending machine, she carries her well-worn stack of horror movie tapes out from under her bed and arranges them on the coffee table. It was Halloween night, which meant some serious consideration was in order. John Carpenter’s Halloween was a given, but was Carrie the best Halloween film? Was A Nightmare on Elm Street too trite? 

She takes a break to make more food as the  _ Halloween _ credits are rolling, and shoves the next tape in the player with enthusiasm, all thoughts of going to anyone’s party forgotten. It’s growing dark outside the windows, and she has a sugar-and-gory-movie buzz that’s almost as pleasant than getting drunk. In hopes of preserving her streak of not getting beaten for anything she’d left her father’s bourbon alone, but had helped herself to a beer from the fridge, assuming correctly that her dad never kept count. Stretching out on the sofa on Halloween night, the wind rattling branches ominously against the thin trailer walls, Thea feels peacefully spooky and happier tonight than she has been since the move in September. 

Halfway through a viewing of  _ the Exorcist _ , though, her mind starts to wander. The blackness outside the windows is now complete, and her father’s continued absence hints that he’s on another one of his all-night drunken benders with his gang buddies. Still, a restlessness settles in her bones as she tries with all her might to focus on the movie. 

In the back of her mind she knows where she’s going when she shrugs on her shoes and steps out the door - knows well enough that there’s only one person who can make her feel bored of her favourite genre. She opts to walk rather than bike, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up, a dark invisible figure among the quiet roads. Trick-or-treaters have long since gone home, but a few houses still have lights on - she can see TVs flickering behind curtains, no doubt similarly playing images of ghosts and demons and death. Some zealous decorations still glow - she passes an orange porchlight and a glow-in-the-dark zombie graveyard, a spotlight illuminating a stuffed-clothes dummy dangling from a tree by its neck. Thea grins to herself and walks faster, charting backwards the path she’d walked home from the Pearl Jam concert. Almost midnight. The spooks were out. 

It’s a straight shot up Elm Street to the Andrews residence: a two-storied yellow house with a duo of jack-o-lanterns grinning invisibly from the porch, their candles long since snuffed out. The house is mostly dark at 11:30pm, with only a single light in the topmost attic window. Thea keeps to the shadows as she scales the elm tree with ease, slipping invisibly along the rim of the roof until she can pull herself up onto the attic windowsill. 

Freddie screams as Thea reaches in her window, the sound drowning out the faint murmur of a TV set across the room from the bed. Thea seizes her bare arm - Freddie’s in only a light floral nightshirt, her hair pulled back into a sporty ponytail - and whispers a warning, glancing around from left to right as she quickly takes in the closed bedroom door, the messy band posters on the walls. 

“Ssh, it’s just me.” 

“What are you doing here?” Freddie whispers, her cheeks flushed as she approaches the window. The TV keeps playing -  _ Frankenstein _ , Thea recognizes. She’d never seen Freddie’s bedroom proper before, only her late brother’s, and finds her eyes wandering over every detail. 

“What, were you sleeping?” 

“Yes, I was sleeping,” Freddie hisses. “My dad is right downstairs. If he hears you-” 

Thea swings a leg over the windowsill and slips into the room. “I’ll just be a sec-” 

A knocking interrupts them, and the door abruptly bursts open. Freddie gasps, but the door bangs into the ajar closet door and can’t open any further - Thea recognizes the precaution as one she’d taken herself in the trailer bedroom when her dad was on one of his benders. The few seconds that the proximity of the closet and the door bought her had probably saved her skin more than once. 

Freddie whirls around and hurries to fill the crack through which her dad can see into the room, while Thea hovers quietly by the wall. She can only see Artie’s shadow behind her friend’s figure. 

Thea had never met Freddie’s dad, but she knew  _ of  _ him now - knew where the squat white church was where he held sermons, and even what times on Sunday you could visit, though she hadn’t yet had the courage to scope it out. Freddie’s voice is annoyed, her hand settling firmly on the edge of the door to keep it from opening further. 

“Can you knock?” 

“I heard screaming.” Artie replies. Thea drops to her knees and hides behind the cover of Freddie’s twin bed, the other girl blocking the view with her body. 

“No, you didn’t.” 

“No?” 

Artie pushes the door open the rest of the way - Thea hears the hinge squeak, but has her cheek pressed to the carpet and can only see Freddie’s bare feet. 

“I could have sworn I heard screaming,” says Artie’s voice. 

“I was watching a scary movie.” 

A suspicious silence, but then Artie relents. “All right. Don’t stay up too late.” 

“I won’t.” 

Thea hears Freddie kiss her father, and then the click of the door closing. Thea sits up, the afghan she’d pulled over her head sliding to the floor. 

“Close call.” 

Freddie whirls around, a finger on her lips to shush her. “What are you doing here?” 

“Well, it occured to me that I’d never snuck through your bedroom window.” Thea stands, dusting off her knees, and wanders toward a cluttered bookshelf that had caught her eye from the roof. She picks up a jewelled comb sitting next to a party-solved rubix cube, turning it over in her hands as she glances back toward the other girl. “I was at home watching television. The Exorcist was on. It made me think of you. 

Freddie stands facing her, looking sweet and clean-scrubbed and bemused in her crumpled nightshirt. Her bare legs look even longer and tanner, and with her hair pulled up, Thea can’t keep her eyes off Freddie’s neck. If she were a vampire, she knows exactly where she’d bite. 

“It did?” 

“Yeah. Have you ever seen a scary movie?” 

A smile plays on Freddie’s lips. “Of course I’ve seen a scary movie.” 

Thea sets the comb down and crosses the room to get closer to her. “Then you know horror has everything to do with good girls and bad girls. Right?” 

“Right?” Freddie echoes, sounding uncertain. Thea smiles, stepping close to her. 

“The bad girls are the ones who have sex before marriage and end up getting stabbed through the face while they’re fucking their boyfriends in the abandoned barn. Tits out, blood all over the place.” Freddie pulls a face, and Thea grins. “You know the ones.” 

“Okay.” 

Thea takes another step forward on the carpet. Warning bells go off in her head, but she ignores them. Fuck, she’d let herself have this. It wasn’t her fault that Halloween got her all riled up. “Horror’s about disrupting the status quo. What normal people think is good and pure and innocent. Follow me?” 

“Sure.” Freddie has her silver cross on - Thea can see the chain of it disappearing into the collar of her nightgown. 

“In the Exorcist, Regan’s family just wants their good little girl back. The return to the good Catholic patrilineal family - that’s the happy ending. But I don’t know. Maybe Regan likes all the vulgar shit she does. Maybe she doesn’t want a nuclear family and a picket fence. Maybe she likes being wrong.” 

Freddie follows her with her eyes, a smile playing on her lips. “So you’re saying I’m going to spin my head around and vomit pea soup.” 

Thea smirks, her breath ghosting over Freddie’s face. “Maybe.” 

Freddie’s hand moves to her throat, thoughtfully stroking the chain of her necklace. “Am I a good girl or a bad girl?” 

“Depends on the movie. Are you a virgin?” 

Freddie blushes. “None of your business.” 

“Fair enough.” Thea steps closer, closing the tiny gap between them. “Good Christian upbringing, masculine name, cute, resourceful. I’d say you’re neither. You’re a final girl.” 

“Come again?” 

“You’re the last one standing at the end of the slasher movie. You make it out alive. The only rule is, she has to be a virgin. Otherwise slasher movies won’t scare kids into sexual purity.” She lowers her voice to a husky whisper as she whispers her next phrase in Freddie’s ear. “The macabre punishment of sexually perverse teenagers helps uphold the status quo.” 

“Why do you know so much about horror?” Freddie asks, a grin playing on her lips. 

“I live it,” says Thea wryly, only half-joking. Freddie tilts her head to the old-fashioned TV sitting on her floral dresser, where villagers are assembling to crucify Frankenstein’s monster. 

“This movie reminds me of you.” 

Thea blinks, turning her head to take in the black-and-white image. “Why?” 

“Because the monster’s sweet and gentle and no one gets it.” 

Thea grimaces. “Come on.” 

“He wants to be loved,” Freddie finishes, undeterred. “But he doesn’t know how to let people in.” 

Thea’s thrown for a second, but regains her footing quickly. “The director was gay, you know. James Whale was gay.” 

She throws it in her face like a warning. Freddie winces at the word, looking uneasily at the television, but then turns back to Thea. “Maybe that’s why it makes sense.” 

Thea reaches for Freddie’s necklace, stroking the cross with her thumb. Freddie leans in automatically, and soon they’re kissing, their mouths colliding in a way that feels too practiced and natural for Thea’s comfort. Thea reaches out to hold Freddie’s bare wrist in her hand, backing her up until they’re at the foot of the bed, the back of Freddie’s shins against the frame. Freddie reads her intention clearly and lets Thea back her onto the mattress, laying down on the bed and letting Thea climb over her. 

Freddie’s body underneath her is intoxicating in a way Thea’s never felt before. She’s sitting on Freddie’s hip-points like they’re wrestling, the heat of the other girl’s body tangible through her clothes, their chests pressing flush together as Thea kisses her until her mouth is sore. Freddie’s hands are tangled in Thea’s short hair, holding tight in a way that implies her submission was all a show, and that she could switch to dominance in any second. For now she keeps pressing up into Thea’s touch as Thea kisses down her throat to the neck of her nightgown, and it’s easy to tell what she likes from the way she moves her body, the soft exhales and sighs that vibrate against Thea’s lips and cheek. 

Thea’s hand creeps up the leg of Freddie’s nightgown, caressing the skin of her slim thigh. She prepares to stop when Freddie shoots her hand down to catch hers, but instead Freddie laces her fingers across the back of Thea’s palm and guides her hand higher against the skin. Thea bends her mouth to Freddie’s neck and picks up the silver cross between her teeth, tugging the necklace gently as her fingers reach the hem of Freddie’s thin cotton underwear. 

“Time’s up stud,” Freddie whispers, and Thea eases off obediently as Freddie pushes her away, unsure if she’s feeling disappointment or relief. Her cheeks colour at the nickname, but Freddie’s blushing too, looking cuter than ever for it. 

“You know what you do to me?” Thea teases, stars blinking in front of her eyes as skin seems to tingle all over. She groans for show as she sits back, but truth be told, she had nothing to complain about. Touching Freddie felt like a gift - this little was more than enough. This little was plenty. She’d go to the ends of the earth for half this much action. 

“You know what my dad would do to you?” Freddie teases back, though Thea feels her elation sink somewhat at the reminder of the danger they were in. Freddie reaches out and takes her hand gently, lowering her head to press their foreheads together when Thea doesn’t pull away. 

“I’ve never done this before,” Freddie admits softly, lowering her voice. She traces the back of Thea’s hand with her finger. “Not with a girl.” 

“Neither have I.” replies Thea softly. Freddie’s head snaps up. 

“But I thought-” 

“What, Joanie?” Thea blushes - she hadn’t really prevented the implication. She looks away, trying to act tough. “You know when you watch a horror movie edited for TV? We were like that. Everything but the good stuff.” 

Freddie loves that - the freckles on her nose scrunch up in a grin. Thea tries not to holler with victory at having made her smile. She’s so stupidly in love she doesn’t think for a moment about her next words. 

“We can wait as long as you want,” she says quickly, her fingers toying with the soft skin of Freddie’s hand as she stares into her brown eyes. “It doesn’t matter to me.” 

“I do want,” replies Freddie earnestly. Her eyes flick regretfully toward the window. “Maybe when my dad’s not downstairs we can do something NC-17. But for now you have to go.” 

“Fine.” Thea climbs off the bed and pauses at the windowsill, turning to look back at Freddie as she steps out and lowers herself to the roof. “Call me stud again, I liked that.” 

“Tell me about it, stud,” says Freddie, and leans out the window to kiss Thea on the lips. Thea grins against her mouth and draws back reluctantly, moving hand over hand back down the shingles to the elm tree. 

“Hey, Thea?” 

“What?” Thea glances up to see Freddie silhouetted in the window

“Would you settle for a PG-13 relationship?” 

“What’s that?” 

Smiling, Freddie yanks the top six buttons of her nightshirt open, causing Thea’s foot to slip and almost plummet off the gutter. Thea’s heart skips a beat, her mouth ajar with surprise, and Freddie laughs like a madman and slams the window down, retreating back into the lit bedroom with a spring in her step until her figure disappears from sight. 

“Tease,” whispers Thea, mostly to herself, her fingers nerveless in a way that has nothing to do with the night air as she climbs down the last few metres to the grass. She feels dizzy as she tilts her head back up when she reaches the ground, but Freddie’s clicked her light off. 

Thea knew there was no world in which this went well for them. The risks so exponentially outweighed the reward that it was laughable. She’d been here before, and she knew it was only a downhill slope, even without the looming threat of Artie’s profession. What they were doing was akin to running up the stairs when you knew the killer was already in the house. 

But something was starting now as Halloween ended, and she couldn’t turn it off. She was in over her head. 

Worst of all, she didn’t mind. 


	12. Chapter 12

“I can’t finish this article!” Alice Smith flings a stack of notes across the editor’s polished mahogany desk in the Blue and Gold office, planting her hands tempestuously on her hips. With a distracted sigh, her boyfriend pulls the papers toward him and scans the first page. 

“What’s going on?” 

“What’s going on is that this girl is impossible to interview!” Alice rages. Hal watches the light glimmer in her curtain of blonde hair. Alice always looked extra-hot when she was furious. “I’ve tried to interview Thea Jones three different times, and three different times she’s clenched up tighter than Fort Knox!” She starts ticking off points on her fingers.  “I don’t know what her family does, I don’t know why they moved to Riverdale, I don’t know how she got interested in football, I don’t know what she does for fun, I don’t know what her old school was like, I don’t know anything that we usually include in the Personal Profiles section! She refuses to answer any of my questions. She just sits there like a brick and then snarks at you if you say the wrong thing. I’ve been insulted by her more times than I can tell you. She’s not just  _ hard _ to interview, she’s  _ infuriating _ .” 

Hal thumbs thoughtfully through the pages, frowning as he takes a bite of a Hostess twinkie that sprinkles crumbs onto the paper. “Has she told you anything?” 

“Nothing.” Alice sighs. “If you get her talking about football you can tell she’s passionate about it, but anything personal? She bites your head off.” 

Hal groans and stretches, pushing his chair back. Alice takes it as an invitation to walk around and sit down on his desk in front of him, dangling her legs in her tight jeans. She slips one arm and then the other out of her cardigan, tying it around her waist. Hal’s hand moves immediately to her upper arm, stroking the skin with his thumb. 

“Just put someone else on the job,” Alice insists. “Unless you want an article talking about what an asshole she is, which I have some  _ great  _ tips about.” 

“Come on, Alice, you know you’re the best reporter we have.” Alice opens a desk drawer with her foot and draws out a snack from Hal’s stash of twinkies. “Plus, if you don’t turn this in, I have to run the story Hiram wrote about his new boat.” 

Alice rolls her eyes. “How’s he still calling it new? He’s had it a month.” 

“He has a new, newer boat. Don’t ask how I know that.” 

“Well, make his day, then.” Alice holds half of the twinkie out to him, and Hal hesitates before taking a bite out of it. “You know me, Hal, would I give up on a story if it wasn’t  _ actually _ impossible? Thea Jones might be a good player but she’s a total jerk. I cant profile her without an interview, it's not our style. She’s not giving me anything to work with.” 

“Why don’t you talk to Freddie? I thought they were kinda close.” 

Alice sighs heavily. Truth be told, she’d been meaning to talk to Freddie about Thea anyway. Alice had been watching them from the back of their English class, and it wasn't pretty. Freddie's mega-crush on the girl was getting worse by the minute, and Alice was terrified that she was going to get hurt. After Oscar's death, Freddie had been anything but stable. Alice wasn't sure she could take anything else going south. 

“Fine. I’ll try to scrape something together.” She pops the rest of the twinkie in her mouth and snatches the last one out of Hal's desk drawer. He opens his mouth as if to protest, but Alice stuffs it down the front of her shirt with a smug wink. 

"Good luck," Hal calls half-heartedly as Alice hops off the desk and crosses the room to the windowed door. Alice pauses in the doorframe. 

“Get Hiram’s boat story ready,” she warns, and lets the door swing shut behind her. 

* * *

Thea slides her cafeteria tray along the metal rails, anxious as she reaches for a slab of lasagna and a bowl of mashed potatoes. Miss Beazley, the scrawny hairnetted woman who served up the school lunches, had taken to letting Thea eat more than her free lunch voucher permitted, but Thea was always paranoid that someone was going to notice and ask her to cough up money she didn’t have. Beazley gives her the nod, though, and Thea relaxes as she takes a dessert. She’d order from Pop’s every day if she could, but apparently there were strict rules about outside food into the school. The caf food wasn’t really _ that  _ bad. It beat starving. 

She’s so focused on what’s on her tray that she doesn’t notice the group of people who fall into line behind her until she hears snatches of their conversation. 

“I know, do you see what she wears?” It’s a male voice, annoyingly familiar. “She owns what, three shirts? Her clothes are so gross.” 

Thea glances at them through her hair. It’s Freddie’s ex-boyfriend, looking perfectly coiffed in a dark green sweater with a cream collar. He’s hitting his stride in his gossip, laughing effortlessly as he raises his voice to mock. 

Thea owns four shirts, actually. Four shirts, two pairs of pants, and a pair of sweats. They’re all worn to shit and falling apart, but what’s she supposed to do? Buy new ones?

In Midvale people left her clothes well enough alone, but that was when she had popular Joanie as a buffer. Midvale was also a bigger town. In Riverdale it mattered what you wore. It mattered a lot. 

“You’re _soooo_ mean, Hank,” a popular girl at his elbow declares, but she doesn’t seem like she’s going to lose any sleep over it. There’s a big fake smile on her face, and she’s hanging on the cheerleader’s every word. 

“What’s mean? You can dress cheap and still look good. It’s bad enough that they’re out of style, but her clothes look like they’re about to fall apart at any second. Forget thrift shop, she found these by the side of the road in a ditch.” 

The girl giggles. “They’re all starchy and pilly and ew, did you see in last period? Major armpit stains.” 

Thea’s shirt does have armpit stains. It’s white and she’s been wearing it since the eighth grade. But it was _ clean _ . Fucking bitches. She slams a square of jell-o onto her tray so hard that it jiggles off the plate. 

“She’s supposed to be the pride of the school and all, you’d think she’d make a little effort.” This bored voice is Hiram’s, who’s tailored pants and silk shirt look like something out of a magazine spread. Thea can tell he’ll wear them once and then never again. “If you want to fit in here, you can’t dress like you’re from the trailer park. I don’t want her anywhere near me, anyway. She looks like she has fleas.” 

The girl suddenly elbows him hard, and he stops speaking abruptly, his dark eyes flashing with amusement as he sees Thea standing in the lunch line. He sniffs and turns up his nose, his cafeteria tray conspicuously absent. Hiram somehow managed to break the lunch rules and bring in meals hand-prepared by his cook every day. 

“Oh, hi Thea.” Hank says, acting completely nonplussed, even proud that she’d caught them talking about her. He shoots a meaningful look at the others in his group as he reaches for a square of blue jell-o, but it’s smug rather than apologetic. “I didn’t see you there. You just kind of blend into the scenery unless you’re on the field, I guess. But wow, what an amazing game last Friday.” His tone is mockingly sincere. “It’s nice that you’ll always have that going for you.” 

_ Bitch,  _ thinks Thea, her hands curling involuntarily into fists. She pictures planting one square in Hank Gomez’ perfect dark brown eye.  _ Bitch, bitch, bitch.  _ There are times when her father’s temper flares out of her, and this is one of them. She has to take a deep breath to get her trembling fists under control. 

“Excuse us, we just need the salad bar,” interrupts Hiram, shoving past her. He grimaces and brushes off his shoulder in the place where they’d collided, and for a second Thea really thinks she’s going to jump on him and start punching. Only the risk of a suspension from the football team keeps her shaking hands at her sides. 

She watches as they file past her, her appetite suddenly all but gone. Once they’re seated at their usual table she quietly moves her tray past the cash register and carries it out toward the bathrooms, anger and grief pressing in on her chest until she feels like her lungs will explode. She closes the door of the handicapped stall behind her with shaking hands and sinks down on the closed toilet lid with her cafeteria tray, fumbling for the lighter she kept in her pocket and the cigarette tucked behind her ear. 

“Fuckers,” she growls, holding the lit cigarette to the peeling blue paint on the wall until it leaves a mark. Burning something feels good - she takes a long draw from the roll and wishes she could put a fist through the plaster instead. Her hands are still trembling with anger, her eyes stinging from the smoke. “Fucking uptight prep school Northside pussies, sons of fucking bitches-” 

She runs through every single curse word she knows, even the truly filthy ones she’d learned at the White Wyrm as a child that she never thought she’d find an occasion to repeat. A faint sputtering noise interrupts her train of thought, and she glances up to see her cigarette had set off the bathroom sprinkler. Fortunately, it’s only dripping - the sprinkler head is so old that it spurts a single sad stream of water down the tile wall, nothing more. 

Thea lifts the lid of the toilet and flushes the cigarette. Then she lowers her head into her lap so that her hair touches her lasagna and starts to cry, the rusty sprinkler water raining sporadically down onto the back of her neck.

* * *

“Gather around,” Hank Gomez commands at their after-school practice, blowing his silver whistle loudly as he motions for the cheerleading squad to fall into line before him. Penelope, co-captain of the squad, stands with her slender arms folded by his side. Shivering in her short skirt, Freddie lags a little behind the others as they stand at attention, her cold hands balled at her thighs. After an unseasonably warm autumn, November temperatures had plunged down to almost freezing. It was almost enough to make her long for the upcoming basketball season - indoors, in a heated gym.  _ Away  _ from her ex-boyfriend. 

“It has come to my attention,” begins Hank, striding up and down before the line of cheerleaders on yet another power trip (“our attention,'' interjects Penelope importantly, even though Hank doesn’t let her get another word in edgewise), “that  _ not every  _ football player has had their locker decorated on game days throughout the season. This is completely unacceptable. It’s our duty to the team - to the school spirit of RHS - to adhere to school traditions. And  _ no one  _ -” He looks dangerously from one face to the next, Penelope nodding by his side - “is going to say that this cheerleading squad isn’t open-minded and accommodating to  _ everyone. _ ” 

Hank glares at a pair of juniors who had been whispering back and forth. “However we might feel about  _ certain players _ , we have to put our personal feelings aside for the look of the squad. Got it?” 

His meaning couldn’t be plainer, but Freddie knows damn well that Hank’s just looking for a pot to stir. It was no one’s oversight but  _ Hank’s _ that no one had been assigned to decorate Thea’s locker on game days for the past month, and Freddie had every reason to believe that the snub was some part of his master plan to make the female quarterback feel as ignored as possible. 

Riverdale High had been divided when Thea first made the team, but despite a rocky start almost everyone was warming to her side - thanks to the string of wins that she’d helped the school cinch over the course of the past month. In fact, Thea was quickly becoming a school hero, since Riverdale was now on track to make the playoffs. Only the most chauvinistic of the male population - Marty Mantle still vocally among them - still had anything to say. 

That said, Thea’s standoffish attitude and disdain for gossip and cheering hadn’t won her any popularity among most of the cheerleaders, who largely ignored her off the football field. Hank and Penelope called bi-weekly cheer meetings at the Choklit shop (really just sporadic gossip sessions) and the consensus was that Thea was making a grave error by alienating the cheerleaders with what the squad considered her self-important attitude. Freddie was starting to get tired of hearing about their skewed priorities - Sandra at their last meeting had expressed deep concern that Thea would never find a date to the winter prom if she kept mucking around on the football field with the boys. 

Freddie rolls her eyes at Hank, and immediately regrets it - the captain stops short in front of her, raising a smug eyebrow as he folds his arms across his royal blue cheerleading sweater. (He still looks damn good in it, which makes her feel worse.) “What about you, Freddie?” he asks, his syrup-sweet voice carrying loudly across the pitch. “You could decorate Thea’s locker every week. Right? Since you’re not dating anyone else.” His voice drips with meaning. “And we all know you two are  _ soooo _ close.” 

“Okay,” Freddie replies, trying to keep her reply neutral. Hank’s trying to humiliate her, and it’s half-working - she feels a big hot blush spreading across her cheeks, and has to drop her eyes down to her sneakers. No one laughs, but she can feel the malicious eyes of the other girls on her. Freddie could feel her popularity waning now that she and Hank had split, and the fact that she kept doggedly sticking up for Thea at meetings wasn’t winning her any favours. Then there were the myriad of rumours she was sure Hank was spreading behind her back - but at least she had faith he wouldn’t spill the most important one. Apparently he had no trouble making the implication, however. 

Hank’s smug smile gets even wider. “Then it’s settled,” he says, his voice light and airy, but his dark brown eyes as cool as ice. “I’m glad we could work that out.” 

Freddie resists the urge to kick him hard in the nuts. 

“Well, that’s that,” speaks up Hank, cutting across Penelope, who had been just about to speak. He claps his hands together. “Practice dismissed. See you all on Wednesday. Inner circle, stay back for a meeting.” 

The few sophomores and the less popular juniors leave the field, picking up their bags and shoes by the sidelines and hurrying back to the warmth of the gym. Freddie hangs around with the others, waiting on instinct for Hank to speak before realizing that everyone’s looking in her direction. 

“Inner circle only,” says Penelope pointedly. Hank gives her an apologetic smile that looks more like a smirk, and ruffles his fingers through his dark, wavy hair. When Freddie doesn’t move, he flicks his fingers at her in an unmistakable sign for dismissal. 

“That’s all we need you for, Freddie. See you on Wednesday.” 

Sandra giggles behind her hand at something her squadmate Tamara says, and it’s that sound that cuts through the disorientation in Freddie’s brain and makes her clench her jaw tight. She shoulders her bag and heads back to the gym in silence, trying to ignore the way Hank says something right after she leaves that makes the whole remaining group explode into laughter. 

Thea’s in the weights room when she gets there, sitting on the bench as she absently does dumbbell curls with one arm. Freddie glances left and right to make sure they’re alone before flinging her bag at Thea’s feet and straddling the bench in front of her, one leg on each side. Thea grins at her, her short, sweat-soaked hair falling into her eyes before she pushes it away. 

“Just in time. I need a spotter.”

Freddie lets out a long, deep breath, her shoulder slumping as she relaxes. They've been meeting after practices to work out together for a week now, which was a welcome way for Freddie to prolong the time she had to go home to her still-depressed parents and empty house. She kind of had the sense that Thea was glad to stay away from home as well, though she never pushed it. Thea brushes a hand through her sweaty hair. 

"Are you okay?"

"Fine." Freddie lies, slipping out of her cheerleading skirt so that she's only wearing her practice shorts. Thea seems to have something on her mind too - their workout passes in near silence, the two of them so attuned to their routine by now that they can communicate without words. Freddie's slung a towel around her neck and is wiping down a rowing machine in silence when Thea finally speaks up from behind her, her words all spilling together in a nervous rush: 

"Would you _teachmetowearmakeup?_ " 

Freddie turns. "What?" 

Thea's standing at the head of the bench, awkwardly rubbing the palm of her hand with her thumb as she avoids Freddie's eyes.

"Would you.." she repeats slowly, her eyes on the ground, "teach me... to wear makeup." 

"Really?" Freddie asks, a grin spreading across her face. Thea's pale cheeks go flushed. 

"Look, if you don't want to-," Thea says defensively, turning her back on Freddie and returning a barbell to the rack.  "Nevermind," she says gruffly. "Pretend I didn't ask."

"Thea! Of course I want to!” Freddie slaps her arm and waits for Thea to look at her. “I just never thought I'd hear you ask for a makeover, that’s all."

"Its not a makeover!" Thea snaps, and Freddie puts her hands up in apology.  The front of Thea's shirt is drenched in sweat from her workout, and Freddie hands her a towel and a waterbottle, keeping quiet.  "You just- I don't know how to do makeup, and you always look so nice, and I thought you could show me something. But forget it.” 

"Oh," replies Freddie cheekily. "Okay. I just thought if it was a makeover we could make a whole day of it, and maybe you could come over to raid my closet if you wanted some new clothes too, and we could do each others' hair and have some fun -” 

Thea swallows hard. “Don’t tease me,” she replies, and Freddie's heart sinks when she sees the beginning of what might be tears pooling in Thea's eyes. Thea seems to notice it too - she looks quickly around the room as though she's afraid of being caught, and wipes her face furtively on the back of her hand. 

"Hey," says Freddie softly, throwing her arms around her friend. "Hey. I'm sorry." Thea's standing as still and tense as a toy soldier in her embrace, so Freddie tightens her hold. "I'm sorry." 

"It's stupid," repeats Thea, and her tiny, hoarse voice almost breaks Freddie's heart. 

"It's not stupid. I'd love to do it. Okay?" 

Freddie steps tentatively back from Thea, holding her gently at arm's length. Thea's tense face is unreadable, but there's a sadness to her that makes Freddie want to cry. "Okay," she says in a little voice, and then, her voice stronger, she smacks Freddie with her towel. "Screw you. Fine. It's a makeover. Call it whatever you want." 

Freddie laughs and tosses her own towel at Thea's head. Thea vaults over the bench to smack her with the sweaty towel again, and Freddie's just getting her hopes up that they might have time to fling each other down on the stack of gym mats and play wrestle when a group of seniors come in with their gym bags, forcing the two of them to slink back over to the exit. 

"Come over right now," Freddie says, scooping her bag up onto her shoulder. "We have dinner late, my dad won't be home." 

At first she thinks Thea's going to refuse. But then her lips curve into a reluctant smile, and her hand touches Freddie's arm, hesitantly, like she thinks she might get thrown off. 

"Sure," she says softly. "That'd be nice." 


	13. Chapter 13

Freddie had warned her about a possible run-in with her mother, who was often home after school, but Thea relaxes when they’re greeted with a blessedly empty house when Freddie’s truck pulls up into the driveway. Thea had glanced at the speedometer on the way over and noticed that every single warning light was lit on the dashboard - this Freddie had shrugged off with a laugh that didn’t quite hide her disappointment. 

“The truck’s not doing so well, I won’t lie, but it’s too cold to do anything about it now. If it lasts the winter, I’ll consider myself lucky.” 

“I could always give you a ride,” Thea had offered smugly, stretching her arm along the back of Freddie’s seat to toy with her wavy hair. Freddie snorted out a laugh. 

“Sure, if you wanted me dead!” She leans over quick, grinning in Thea’s personal space, and Thea’s over-aware that the gesture might have accompanied a kiss on the cheek if either of them had been a boy. Freddie reaches across her lap, her hand brushing tantalizingly over Thea’s thighs as she reaches for the button to unbuckle Thea’s seatbelt. “Come on, stud. No one’s home.” 

Thea’s never entered Freddie’s house by the front door: it flings open to reveal a cluttered, unremarkable mudroom through which a carpeted hallway leads into a living room. It’s  _ homey _ , Thea recognizes with a soft pang of want: jackets tossed on the bench, family photos cluttering the walls, stacks of mail and a welcome mat, the walls painted a warm butterscotch yellow. Freddie doesn’t give her time to linger, however: she seizes Thea by the hand and drags her up two flights of stairs to her attic bedroom - the first set soft with blue carpeting, the second more narrow and treacherous. 

“You ever break your ankle coming home drunk?” Thea asks, leaving fingerprints on the wall as she tries to keep from slipping on the wood. Freddie only laughs. 

“If I come home drunk I come in through my window.” 

Freddie’s room looks different in the daylight: the sun slants cheerfully through the two curtained windows, landing as a spotlight on the mosaic of pictures and posters on the far wall. Her bright red guitar leans up against the mattress - Freddie moves it carefully to the side before taking a flying leap onto her duvet, tossing her head back so that her hair tumbles off the side of the bed. She pats the mattress next to her, but Thea feels suddenly too nervous to lay down. She starts wandering instead, running her finger down a photo frame on the wall. The photo is a younger Freddie with her father. 

“You and your dad seem close,” Thea remarks, stowing her hands in her pockets. It suddenly feels wrong to be touching. 

“We used to be.” Freddie flips upright again, her butterscotch hair falling around her face. “I was his little girl and all that.” She rolls her eyes. “He still hasn’t gotten over the fact that I’m a teenager now. And after Oscar died - he just kinda stopped checking in. Both my parents. They’re like zombies now.” 

Thea frowns. “Better than me and my dad.” 

“What’s your dad like?” 

“Nothing,” says Thea quickly. “He’s like nothing.” 

Freddie falls silent, seemingly knowing when not to push. She picks up her guitar as Thea keeps exploring, idly strumming a chord. Thea’s fingers bump into a stack of paper, and her stomach runs inexplicably cold when she recognizes a stack of college brochures and applications, held together by a thick rubber band. 

She holds them up. “Is this where you’re applying?” 

“Nah.” Freddie strums again and sets the guitar down. “Those were Ozzie’s. My mom went psycho awhile ago and started throwing a bunch of his stuff out. I took those before she could get her hands on them.” 

“Oh.” Thea scrutinizes the top page. The kids in the photo look like they’re having the time of their lives, lounging under the shade of a tree with their textbooks and perfectly ironed collars. She hates them all on sight. 

“Yale was his first choice.” Freddie shrugs. Don’t ask  _ me _ about college. I don’t wanna think about it.” 

Thea sinks down into the desk chair, holding the brochures like they’re made of gold. “Why don’t you want to think about it?” 

“I dunno, I just like living in the moment, you know?” Freddie crosses her legs and tugs the guitar back into her lap, diverting her eyes to the strings. “It’s too scary to think about right now. I’ll deal with it later.” She plucks a dissonant note. “Maybe I’ll even take a year off. Who knows. At least we have another year before we have to start applying.” 

“ _ You _ have another year. I wish I could go.” Thea’s voice comes out so damn sincere that it scares her a little. “I don’t mind thinking about it.” 

Freddie looks up with a frown, fingers poised on the frets. “Why can’t you apply?” 

“The money, for one,” Thea replies sourly. “College isn’t exactly free.” 

“Thea!” Freddie jumps up off the bed and crosses the room, a grin lighting up her face as she grabs Thea’s hands and pulls her to her feet. “There are football scholarships! Do you realize how many football players get a free ride to any college they want? There are gonna be scouts coming to see the playoffs, and let’s face it. The way you play, you’ll have offers this year, I bet!” 

Thea can tell Freddie’s waiting for a positive reaction, but gloom settles in her heart and drags it down to her feet. “Not me.” 

“What are you talking about? You’re a shoo-in.” 

Thea scoffs. “No college is going to take me.” 

“Why the hell not? I’ve seen you play!” Freddie’s warm hand touches her shoulder cautiously. “Is it your marks? You can get them up. I’ll tutor you, no problem. We can meet every night. Or you can find someone who’s actually good at that stuff. My friend Alice is great. But tons of people pull their marks up in time for college. And-” 

“It’s not my marks, Freddie.” Thea’s cheeks are hot again. “You wouldn’t understand.” 

“Well, I don’t see the issue, then.” 

“Yeah, well  _ you _ wouldn’t.” 

“What does that mean?” Freddie folds her arms, cocking a challenging eyebrow. “Try me.” 

Frustration seizes Thea’s throat like a vice. “Look around you. You live in this nice house on a cul-de-sac. Your brother wanted to go to Yale. Of course you’re going, and of course you’ll get offers. But it’s not like that for me.” 

“Why are you so hung up on my house?” Freddie’s voice is tough, but the big sad eyes she’s giving Thea are more like a kicked puppy. “Thea, sports scholarships are for  _ everyone. _ If this is what you want-” 

“Right. Like any college is going to take a kid from a trailer park who can’t even read.” 

“You can’t  _ read? _ ” Freddie drops her tough demeanour all at once, her eyes blowing wide and her mouth falling open in shock. Thea crosses her arms protectively over her chest and stares at the floor. “Bullshit. You read all the time.” 

“No, I don’t.” 

“You read our science labs. You’re getting straight A’s in Chemistry.” 

“You read them,” Thea corrects her, her cheeks burning as she confesses. “You read out loud to yourself and I just listen to you and remember.” 

Freddie’s mouth falls further open. “There’s no way. You read the menu at Pop’s.” 

Thea stares at her feet. “There are pictures.” 

“Are you serious? You’re not putting me on?” 

“Why would I lie about this, Freddie?” 

Freddie shakes her head, looking suddenly triumphant. “You read my note.” 

“What?” 

“The first day I met you! I passed you a note in English and you read it.” 

“Well, you didn’t use very big words!” Thea snaps. “I can’t read  _ well. _ I’m not a baby, I can sound shit out. I just can’t read a freaking novel or a whole essay or anything.” 

Freddie’s gaping at her. “You’re really, really serious? Because it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I don’t care. But if you’re putting me on, I’m going to slug you.” 

“I’m not putting you on!” Thea snaps. “I didn’t have the best home life growing up and I wasn’t in school all the time and I don’t know how to read well. Okay? Does it make sense why I’m not going to college, now?” 

Freddie sits down on the bed and takes Thea’s hand in hers, and it’s stupid, but her soft touch calms Thea down all at once. “How’d you get so far in school?” Freddie asks honestly. Her brown eyes are still wide, but she doesn’t seem to be put off. “How are you passing English now?” 

Thea pretends to be fascinated by the pattern on her duvet. “I was flunking in Midvale. And I copied a lot. I’m copying off the dude who sits beside me when we do quizzes.” 

“Thea.” 

Thea shakes her head, looking away. 

“Thea, look at me.” Freddie’s hand cups her cheek and moves Thea’s head gently up. When they’re looking at one another, her tanned face breaks into a bright, excited grin. "You can learn how to read!” 

Thea shakes her head again. 

“I can teach you how to read!” 

“No.” 

“Why not? 

Thea sucks in a breath. “I don’t know. I just -  _ I don’t know. _ ” 

“Hey. If you keep playing football the way you do, no college is going to care where you’re from.” Freddie’s voice is very gentle. “Seriously. And they won’t care about this either. But I will teach you. I can be a good teacher.” She puts her arms around Thea, rocking them both to the side as a fixed unit, her breath hot on Thea’s neck as she teases her playfully. “I’ll read to you every night. We’ll read all kinds of things. I’ll put on movies with subtitles. It’ll be great.” 

There’s a lump in Thea’s throat - she tries to swallow it away, but it only feels like trying to swallow rocks. Why are you doing this? She wants to ask. It didn’t make sense. Girls like Freddie didn’t stick around for girls like her.  _ Enjoy it while it lasts _ , a voice in her head warns. 

Freddie’s voice is plaintive in response to Thea’s silence, her warm breath still tickling the skin of Thea’s neck. “Promise you’ll at least try for me, okay? You’ll give me a chance? I can be a good teacher, I know it.” 

“Maybe.” 

“ _ Pleaseee. _ ” Freddie stretches out the word like a little kid. “If your talent goes to waste because of this, I’ll never forgive myself. Never ever ever.” 

Thea cracks a smile despite herself. No one was as persuasive as Freddie when she had her heart set on something. For barely a moment she allows herself to imagine it, her eye flitting to the stack of college brochures - and then she shuts it down. Trying to fit in at Riverdale by changing her appearance was one thing. But getting hung up on having a  _ future _ \- that was a little more than wishful thinking. 

“Sorry, this is stupid.” Thea wiggles out of Freddie’s slender arms. “We got off topic. Forget about it, okay?” 

“Okay.” Freddie lets her distance herself, but keeps her arm stretched out toward Thea on the duvet. “Hey, I’m sure it’s not that uncommon. And if you’re getting as far as you are in school without reading anything, you must be _ really  _ smart. Really, really smart. I mean it.” 

Thea awkwardly tucks her hair down behind her ears. The only thing worse than being insulted was getting a compliment. “Dunno.” 

“I can teach you to play guitar too.” 

“Maybe one thing at a time.” She nibbles on her fingernail, wishing she had a toothpick or something else in her mouth. Thea was a chewer. “I came here for makeup help, remember?” 

“Okay, but if you ever wanna rock with us, I’m serious. We need new people in the band.” 

Freddie’s so earnest and serious when she talks about  _ the band _ that Thea finds another smile creeping up on her lips. She swats Freddie playfully on her arm to remind her that she’s not mad at her. “Remind me when your next show is. I want to come.” 

“At the bowling alley next weekend,” Freddie replies. “We’re doing a bunch of Springsteen covers. All the old people love it.” 

Thea shrugs. “I don’t know him.” 

Freddie’s eyes get as big as dinner plates. “Bruce Springsteen?” 

“Who?” 

“You haven’t heard of Bruce Springsteen!?” Freddie’s on her feet in a flash, looking thunderstruck for the second time. If possible, she’s even more worked up than she’d been about Thea’s illiteracy. “Bruce Springsteen?? The Boss??” 

“If people don’t mosh at their concerts, I probably don’t know them.” 

“You have to know Bruce Springsteen, at least a little!” 

“I dunno, sing something of theirs. His.” 

“Bruce Springsteen!!” Freddie’s practically beside herself with emotion. “Born to Run? Born In The USA? How can anyone alive not know Born to Run or Born In The USA?” 

“Does he write about anything else than being born something?” 

“Thea-” Freddie flops helplessly back onto her bed, her arms akimbo. “I can take you not knowing how to read. But not knowing Bruce Springsteen-” 

“Shut up!” Thea elbows her to the side of the bed, and Freddie rolls away from her with a laugh. “I literally just told you to stop talking about that. Is it a person or a band?” 

Freddie just stares at her from her position on the mattress, her jaw slack. “Bruce…. Springsteen…. Is the person,” she says slowly. “The band is called the E Street… Band... _ now  _ you’re putting me on, right?” 

Thea rolls her eyes and gestures to the stereo. “Just because you’re obsessed, doesn’t mean everyone knows them. Play something and I’ll tell you if I’ve heard it or not.” 

Freddie sits up, but she ignores the stereo, reaching instead for her guitar. She cradles the instrument in her lap, fingers picking silently at the strings before she strums a chord and starts to sing in a low voice: 

_ “Baby this town rips the bones from your back, _

_ It’s a death trap, it’s a suicide rap, _

_ We gotta get out while we’re young, _

_ ‘Cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run.”  _

She looks up at Thea expectantly, but Thea only shrugs. “I don’t know it. Play some more.” 

Freddie’s face lights up like a beacon. “I knew you’d like it.” 

“I didn’t say I liked it. I like watching you play.” The way the sun’s hitting Freddie’s hair right now, it makes a halo above the crown of her head. Thea’s grateful for the excuse to look at her. She has something sparkly on her eyelids, but it’s only noticeable in the sunlight. Thea could probably look at her for hours. 

Freddie smiles and fiddles with the guitar for a moment before repositioning herself on the bed, cross-legged. “This one’s for you.” Then she starts to sing in the sweetest voice Thea’s ever heard: 

_ “With her killer graces, and her secret places that no boy can fill, _

_ With her hands on her hips, oh, and that smile on her lips, because she knows that it kills me, _

_ With her soft french cream, standing in that doorway like a dream, _

_ I wish she’d just leave me alone-”  _

She strums the guitar energetically, and Thea shoves her playfully. Freddie puts the guitar aside and shoves back, and soon they’re roughhousing on the bed, Thea quickly gaining the upper hand and pinning Freddie down. 

Thea’s stronger than Freddie is: her arms are beginning to get harder and bulkier with muscle, and while three meals at Pop’s a day isn’t really proper eating, she’s gained a little weight. Freddie doesn’t seem to mind being pinned: she stares up at Thea with eyes as bright as Christmas morning. “You’re amazing,” she says, and it’s so simple, so honest in her voice, that Thea forgets how to breathe. 

To be honest, it scares her shitless. No one was supposed to  _ like  _ her like this. Freddie’s curled fingers softly graze the front of Thea’s  _ Metallica _ shirt, and suddenly she’s over-aware of how old and stretched out the grey fabric is, how it’s scratchy and coarse and shapeless and overdue for a trip to a landfill. This _ thing _ is all kinds of wrong and dangerous for too many reasons to count, but suddenly all she can think about is how nothing about her is nice enough for Freddie to touch. And yet Freddie holds her like she’s glass, doesn’t care that she can’t read or do makeup or go to college, and that’s the worst part of this whole fucked up scenario. 

Freddie leans upward like she’s going for a kiss, but Thea pretends to be suddenly fascinated by the stack of college brochures that had tumbled to the ground. She climbs off Freddie’s hips to pick them up, avoiding the other girl’s eyes as she straightens the stack and places it back on the shelf where she’d found it. Then she wanders the perimeter of the room, straightening things on the shelves, looking at old knick-knacks and pictures, her shoulders turned in like she’s trying to hide from herself. She wants to bolt, but doesn’t want to leave the room. She can’t look at Freddie, except out of the corner of her eyes. She’s afraid she’ll start to cry. 

In the small glances she allows herself she notices that Freddie sits up, her fingers toying with a lock of her brown hair and chewing absently on the end of it. Thea’s spine is on edge as she follows the line of the wall, her shirt itchy on her back. She’s struck with a horrible urge to say something rude to Freddie - to push her away and end this thing for good. 

A chord from the guitar interrupts her thoughts. Freddie sings as if to herself: when Thea turns to look at her her eyes are cast down to her fingers, concentrating on the song as she plays with ease. 

_ “ _ _ You been hurt and you're all cried out you say,  _

_ You walk down the street pushin' people outta your way, _

_ You packed your bags and all alone you want to ride, _

_ You don't want nothin', don't need no one by your side, _

_ You're walkin' tough baby, but you're walkin' blind, _

_ To the ties that bind,”  _

Thea sits down on the very end of the bed, her gaze straying to Freddie’s lips even as she tries to keep herself from looking.  Some of the sparkly makeup is caught in her eyelashes, and they sparkle too. 

Freddie glances up for just a second, and the moment when their eyes meet is like an electric jolt. This time, Freddie doesn’t look away, nodding to the music as she sings: 

_ “ _ _ Cheap romance, it's all just, just a crutch,  _

_ You don't want nothing that anybody can touch,  _

_ You're so afraid of being somebody's fool,  _

_ Not walkin' tough baby, not walkin' cool,  _

_ You walk cool, but darling, can you walk the line,  _

_ And face the ties that bind. _

_ The ties that bind-”  _

She stops, smiling a little. “Is there something in my teeth?” 

“No.” 

Freddie touches her head. “Is my hair doing something weird? You’re staring.” 

“I-” Thea stutters, trying to recover her cool. “I- like your eyeshadow.” 

God. She cringes internally. She sounded like such a  _ girl.  _ Freddie’s smile gets big and wide and impossibly cuter. 

“Makeup! I didn’t forget!” She slides off her bed and plunks the guitar on the floor, crossing the room toward the direction of her dresser: a wide, white monstrosity with floral painted drawers. It seems out of place in her otherwise messy and masculine room. Thea gets up as well, inching her way instinctively back toward the bookshelves, meaning to busy her hands by picking up Freddie’s things once again. But Freddie suddenly stops her, walking over to take Thea by the wrists. 

“Sit down,” Freddie says, pushing Thea back into a sitting position on her bed. Thea obligingly lets herself be moved, feeling almost as nervous as she had showing up to football tryouts. Freddie retreats to her dresser and returns with an old, beat-up Reebox shoebox which she dumps unceremoniously onto the duvet. 

“This is all my makeup.” She settles back down on the bed next to Thea, closer this time, drawing her legs up to sit cross-legged, and Thea tries not to obsess over the way their knees slightly overlap, no duvet between them. “Some of it is like, a billion years old. Just to warn you.” 

“Whatever.” Thea watches her hands as she spreads everything out on the covers, sitting as rigidly on Freddie’s bed as she would in a dentist chair. She’s suddenly fascinated by her thin fingers, the shape of her nails. Freddie pulls Thea’s arm into her lap, wrist upward, stroking her forearm with her thumb. 

“You’re a little bit paler than me, but that’s okay.” She looks up at Thea, her eyeshadow and eyelashes and big brown eyes even closer now, and Thea’s mouth goes very dry. “I’ll show you a really easy makeup look, the one I do every day. It’ll look good, I promise.” 

“I trust you,” Thea replies, the loaded meaning of those words not lost on her. God help her, she was trusting Freddie - with everything. 

Suddenly, Freddie swings a leg over Thea so that she’s straddling her, balancing on her knees on the duvet before lowering her weight into Thea’s lap. 

“Can I sit here? It’s easier.” 

“Sure,” replies Thea nonchalantly, trying to belatedly calm her racing heart. Freddie’s weight on top of her thighs is sucking all the focus out of her body - the pressure and heat against her skin, even through two pairs of jeans, is almost unbearable. It makes her heart race with thoughts of all the other ways and places their skin could touch. 

“You have really perfect skin.” Freddie’s thumb brushes her cheek, her breath tickling Thea’s throat. “You don’t even need makeup, honestly. That’ll make it easier.” 

“T-Thanks?” It comes out like a question. Thea  _ definitely _ couldn’t take a compliment if her life depended on it, especially not from a girl she’s attracted to who’s currently  _ sitting on her lap.  _ Panic soars up in her throat and wins. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want-” 

“You’re supposed to use brushes and stuff, but I just use my fingers,” Freddie chatters over her, digging through her stash of clattering makeup. “Is that okay?” 

“Sure…” 

“We’ll start with this.” Freddie holds up a compact. “Covergirl. It’s concealer. Well, it’s supposed to be concealer and powder together. I dunno. I just use it as a concealer.” Thea must look blank, because Freddie quickly explains. “Concealer, by the way, is what you put under your eyes if you have massive dark circles in the morning like me.” 

“You don’t-” Thea protests loyally. 

“See? It’s working.” Freddie laughs and opens the compact to reveal a damp square of flesh-coloured makeup. “Powder goes all over your face to even your complexion out, but I don’t really use it. You sure as hell don’t need it. So I would just start with this if you have zits or undereye circles or something.” 

Thea nods diligently, deciding to commit everything to memory since she didn’t know what was most important. Easier said than done, since Freddie wiggling around on her lap was more than a little distracting. 

“This kind is liquid, and you’re supposed to rub it on with a sponge. Like I said, I always just use my thumb. Here.” 

She dabs her finger under Thea’s eye, and Thea jerks back with a wince. 

“Don’t flinch! I’m not going to hurt you.” 

Thea swallows hard, the irony not lost on her.  _ You just might.  _

“Then you blend it in-” Freddie’s soft, thin fingers rub gently under her eyes for what seems like an unbearable hour or two - “but you really want to blend it until you can’t tell the difference between your skin and the makeup. Otherwise you look goofy.” 

“Okay,” says Thea, and her voice comes out unbearably nervous. Freddie pauses, seeming to somehow pick up on how important this was to her friend. 

“Dude, like I said, you don’t even have to wear makeup.” She resumes her rubbing, a little furrow of concentration in the centre of her brow. “You’re already hot. But if you want it, it’s really easy to learn how. Well, except for eyeliner. It takes like, a month to figure out how to draw it on straight. It almost killed me.” 

“Eyeliner,” Thea repeats. 

“You got it. But don’t worry, I’ll help. Okay. Eyeshadow.” Freddie opens up a beat-up pallette and Thea examines the colours with trepidation. “I’ll do the same thing that I’m wearing. I usually use this one-” she indicates an almost scooped-out glittery beige - “and a little of these two,” - she indicates a dark brown and a magenta that seem to Thea that they would look awful together. She raises her thumb to her mouth. 

“Can I lick my thumb?” 

“Sure.” 

Freddie licks the pad of her thumb quickly and rubs it in the dark brown. Thea swallows hard and wills herself to believe Freddie knows what she’s doing as she shuts her eyes. 

“This part of your eye is called the crease,” Freddie narrates as she smudges the makeup gently above Thea’s eyelid. “If you put a darker colour here, and a light one on your actual eyelid, you’re pretty much good to go. Seriously. That’s the secret.” 

“Really?” Thea tries to half-open her eyes, but has to close them again. Freddie giggles. 

“Stop blinking.” 

“I can’t.” Thea’s instincts are screaming at her to flinch away from the fingers on her eyelids. Freddie laughs and wraps a hot hand around Thea’s wrist, pulling slightly and holding her steady. 

“I’ve got this. Relax.” 

In the darkness of her closed eyelids, Thea’s left alone with the angles of Freddie’s body in her lap. They’re  _ so  _ close - every so often Freddie’s warm breath tickles the skin in the hollow of her neck. She hopes Freddie can’t tell how her hands are shaking, or how unevenly her own breath is coming. She can smell the shampoo coming off Freddie’s hair: an intoxicating mix of artificial strawberry and mango. 

What did her own hair smell like? Was her breath bad? Was she shaking? 

“Okay, I’m doing eyeliner now.” Thea opens her eyes, but Freddie’s chest is blocking her view of the mirror over the dresser. She’s holding a thin brown pencil. “It’s basically just a pencil crayon. Harder than it looks, though. I use brown, and it looks really nice. Now _ hold still _ .” 

Thea tries, eyes shut again, but the eyeliner is even harder to keep from blinking against. Freddie’s fingers press hard against her forehead, keeping her head steady as she rises just a little up onto her knees. With the other hand, Freddie gently pulls the skin around her eye, raking the pencil sharp and uncomfortable along her eyelid. 

“The trick is making a little dotted line right through your eyelashes. Then you smudge it all together. Look up?” 

“What?” 

Freddie wiggles back into Thea’s lap, shifting her weight on Thea’s thighs. “Look up at the ceiling, and I’ll put some underneath your eye.” 

“Right.” Thea’s starting to throb from Freddie’s closeness, sweat gathering on the back of her neck. She doesn’t think she can do this much longer. She obediently looks up at the slanted roof, forcing herself to stay still as Freddie shoves the pencil almost directly into her eye. 

“Perfect!” Freddie sits back, leaving a bit of space between them for the first time, and Thea lets out a breath she’s been holding for the past several minutes. Freddie rummages around on the bed for a white tube. 

“This is mascara. It’s Covergirl too. It makes your eyelashes prettier. Mine is brown, but I dunno why. Alice read in a magazine it’s supposed to look good with my complexion.” 

Thea sits obediently still as Freddie teaches her how to apply mascara to her top and bottom eyelashes, nodding aimlessly along to her warning that applying mascara before the rest of your eye makeup would mess everything up. She can already tell she’s going to have to ask for a second lesson - she’d already forgotten everything that had happened since Freddie dropped her bony ass right onto her crotch. 

Freddie is rubbing something pink energetically onto her finger. She holds the finger to Thea’s lips. 

“Kiss.” 

Hesitant, Thea pouts her lips so that they brush the pad of Freddie’s finger. Freddie frowns in concentration, gently applying the lip gloss. Then she sucks the remainder off of her finger and squints at Thea’s face. 

“You need a little bit of blush,” Freddie declares, opening a square of something aggressively pink and rubbing in it with her thumb. Thea balks. 

“I’m okay.” 

“Thea!” Freddie’s no-nonsense voice brooks no argument. It also makes her skin itch in the best way. “Don’t you trust me?” 

“I do,” Thea admits begrudgingly, closing her eyes again on instinct. Freddie rubs something into her cheeks and suddenly swings her weight off of Thea’s lap without warning, leaving a hot, tingly glow behind. 

“Here.” Thea opens her eyes to see Freddie offering her a hand mirror, a huge smile lighting up her face. “You can keep all this makeup if you want. It looks better on you than it does on me.” 

Thea stares into the hand mirror, momentarily distracted from her arousal by how fucking  _ normal _ she looks. She has to quickly touch her cheek to make sure it’s really her reflection. There’s something beige and sparkly on her eyelids, and her eyelashes look darker and longer. She looks _ fresh _ and  _ glowy _ and  _ pretty _ and all those magazine words - the magazines she used to look at furtively in the supermarket checkout to admire the pretty women on the covers, the magazines left scattered behind in the girls locker room, where girls who would never talk to her or give her the time of day adjusted their makeup. 

She looks like someone who would always have friends to sit with at lunch. She looks like a fucking Northside girl, and rather than making her scream, the thought makes something stupid and warm and hopeful well up inside her stomach.  _ Fuck.  _ She was in this deep. 

“Thanks,” Thea manages, her mouth suddenly as dry as cotton. 

“It’s really not hard. Now lie down, and I’ll show you how to make it really cool.” Freddie abruptly pushes Thea down onto the bed until she’s lying on her back, a grin breaking over her cheeks as she climbs back over her and shifts her weight on Thea’s hips. She perches directly over her hips, leaning forward to rifle through her makeup and giving Thea a perfect view down the front of her shirt. She’s not wearing a bra. 

Freddie chooses an eyeshadow palette and rubs her thumb in a vibrant blue, leaning forward to swipe her fingers across Thea’s eyelids. “Close your eyes,” she whispers again, and the huskiness of her voice combined with her position on top of Thea makes her whole body throb even worse, her thighs tickly and hot under Freddie’s body. 

Thea closes her eyes obediently, but it only makes her hyper-aware of the pressure of Freddie’s weight, the gentle touch on her eyelids, the heavy silence of Freddie’s concentration. She reaches up tentatively and slips her fingers into Freddie’s hips, anchoring her in place. Freddie’s fingers travel all over her face, but Thea’s mostly aware of the pressure from her hips, the burning hot place where their bodies are connected. 

“Open,” says Freddie after what feels like an eternity, and Thea takes the heavy mirror from her and stares at her vibrant blue eyeshadow and winged eyeliner. Freddie’s turned her into some kind of glamour queen, and Thea’s supposed to hate it, only for the first time in her life she feels like something approximating beautiful. Stupid. Stupid, and yet-

She drops the mirror and reaches up to drag Freddie’s face down to her own. Freddie kisses her hard, wasting no time in laying down on top of her and pressing their bodies as tightly as possible. The makeup tumbles off the duvet as Thea turns them on their sides so they’re facing each other, Thea’s hand sneaking up to tug open the buttons on Freddie’s shirt. She slips her hand inside and cups Freddie’s breast, Freddie hurrying them along by yanking free the rest of the buttons herself and taking her shirt off entirely, exposing her skinny shoulders and the fading tan lines all over her skin. 

Thea responds by pulling off her own shirt in one easy movement, Freddie’s tongue still in her mouth until the painful moment where the fabric has to pass over her head, driving their faces apart. Then they’re crashing their faces back together, Freddie’s hand sneaking up to cup her cheek, and Thea gives herself over to the feeling of kissing her, her muscles loose and pliant and relaxed and drunk off inhaling the mango-and-strawberry smell of Freddie’s hair. 

The bottles of makeup scattered under their bare backs make them giggle, but then Freddie’s kicking the whole mess onto the floor in one go and the kisses get warmer and heavier, Thea rolling them the rest of the way over so that it’s her turn to rest her weight on Freddie’s hips. She puts her mouth over Freddie’s nipples, kisses her breasts and chest and collarbone, nuzzling into the soft skin with her nose and leaving the occasional smear of blue makeup behind. She could have surrendered herself to an eternity of kissing Freddie here - exploring the baby-fine hairs that sweep down her neck, the way her bones make peaks and valleys and pockets of skin where her tongue and teeth can lap and nip like a kitten. Freddie’s hand is in her hair, driving Thea’s head down toward her skin, her breathing coming hard and fast, mixed with the occasional little noise of pleasure when Thea hits a sensitive spot. 

Her cross necklace has fallen askew over one shoulder. Thea drags it back into place with her teeth, and Freddie surprises her by reaching up and fumbling with the chain to unhook it, puddling the silver cross in her hand and flinging it far across the room to smack against the corner wall and disappear behind a pile of dirty socks. Thea pauses, and for a moment they’re facing each other on the bed, conversing without words, Thea thinking that she could fall and drown into the bottomless ocean of Freddie’s brown eyes if one of them didn’t blink. 

“Keep going,” says Freddie firmly, and that’s all the invitation Thea needs. 

She starts at Freddie’s heartbeat, kissing the warmth of her left breast and peppering a trail of hot, open-mouthed kisses down the centre of her ribs. The gold skin of her belly is taut and warm, her hipbones making pockets of skin on each side of her jeans, and the thought of putting her nose and tongue there makes Thea shiver just a little. 

When she reaches the peach fuzz below her navel she looks back up, leaving one last wet, heavy kiss above her waistband like a brand, and Freddie’s looking back down at her with a softness that makes fireworks go off in her chest. 

“You’re so beautiful,” she says to Thea, her voice breathless and reverent. “You’re gorgeous.” 

“You’re so small,” Thea replies, which is a stupid thing to say, but it’s all her mind can turn into words right now, the only thing she can think about: Freddie’s narrow hips and bony shoulders, the way she fit perfectly under Thea’s body like two halves of a whole. “You’re so small and perfect and - you smell like strawberries.” 

Freddie grins at her. “Keep going,” she says again, and the heavy meaning laden behind the words makes goosebumps break out along Thea’s bare spine. 

“Are you sure?” 

“ _ Thea. _ ” 

Thea works the button of Freddie’s jeans loose without effort, pulling her zipper down with a barely audible noise that nevertheless sets the hairs on her neck on end. Freddie’s underwear is a plain blue cotton - she lifts her narrow hips so Thea can work the jeans down to mid-thigh, pausing to kiss the newly visible skin on the tops and insides of her thighs. Freddie’s ticklish there - Thea files the knowledge away for later as her fingers curl in the waistband of the denim, working her jeans lower and lower until they’re around Freddie’s calves. 

Her thighs, Thea probably really could kiss forever - she’d never had a chance to explore this part of Freddie and she relishes in it, this skin even softer than the rest of her, still hot from being trapped under clothes. She kisses the whole surface of each thigh, and only Freddie’s impatient hands tugging at her hair hints that she should stop. 

“Keep going?” Thea asks, looking back up at those perfect brown eyes. 

“Yes.” 

Freddie’s jeans get tangled around her feet - she kicks her legs to free them, and Thea helps her pull them loose entirely, the tangle of denim sliding off the end of the bed. Thea undoes her own jeans in response, pulling them down from behind and awkwardly lifting each knee to get them off. It occurs to her to be embarrassed about her cheap underwear, but they seem to be past the point of embarrassment with one another, and Freddie’s eyes don’t leave her face, anyway. She’s looking up at Thea like she hung the stars in the sky, and while it scares her shitless, it’s kind of exhilarating too. 

“You have an incredibly hot body, you know,” says Thea, taking a long moment to really look at her, tracing her eyes down Freddie’s tiny, full breasts and long, tanned stomach. It’s Freddie’s turn to blush, her cheeks and neck glowing pink. 

“Shut up,” she complains as Thea’s fingers ghost ticklishly down her stomach toward her hips. “Do not.” 

“You do.” For a moment, pulling Freddie’s underwear down seems too unbearable scary to try, and Thea thinks she might be able to get the job done through the fabric with just her hand, but Freddie renders it a moot point by pulling off her underwear herself, kicking it down to her ankles the way she had done with her jeans and tossing it aside. Then it seems stupid for Thea not to take her own off, and then she’s bending her head to Freddie’s stomach again, laying a trail of kisses down to where the line of fuzz below her belly button got darker. 

She had been truthful when she’d told Freddie that she and Joanie had never got this far - Thea doesn’t know exactly what to do, but she doesn’t have a hard time figuring it out, starting by mimicking the way she touches herself and following Freddie’s reactions from there. Once when Freddie really likes what Thea’s doing, her hand flashes out and guides Thea’s wrist, and the action makes Thea’s brain short-circuit and her legs turn to jelly. 

She starts with her fingers and the palm of her hand, finally gets the courage to use her mouth, and Freddie’s skinny thighs close around her head like a vice and then there’s really no going back. The noises Freddie’s making make her body want to shake apart - little gasps and sighs and the occasional unabashed moan that dissipates any fears Thea might have had about whether she was doing okay. 

She loses track of time until Freddie goes abruptly tense, her hips pushing up off the sheets just a little until her body relaxes and melts back into the duvet, her thighs pressing hard and tight against Thea’s neck before finally letting her free. Thea stops what she’s doing, but suddenly doesn’t know what the hell to do next. She doesn’t look at Freddie’s face, too afraid of seeing the look that Joanie always gave her when they went too far. Instead she lays her cheek down against the jagged peak of Freddie’s hipbone and only rests her head on her stomach, her face so hot that it felt like a furnace. 

“Holy shit,” says Freddie, breaking the silence, and then a sharp tug on Thea’s hair forces her to look back up at her friend. The expression on Freddie’s face isn’t the one she’d been afraid of: Freddie’s blushing but she’s smiling too, a cute flush breaking across her cheeks and swallowing up her freckles. Thea wiggles up a little so that they’re laying almost face-to-face, and Freddie’s smile gets even bigger. 

_ “Thea Jones,”  _ she says, still in a  _ holy shit  _ voice, and Thea feels the stupidest smile in the world break over her cheeks. She hides her face in Freddie’s chest, too embarrassed to keep looking at her. Freddie’s heart is beating fast, fast, fast under her cheek - or maybe it’s own her pulse pounding violently in her ears. Freddie’s hand cards gently through her hair, and Thea has to hold down a shiver. 

“There’s no way you’ve never done that before,” says Freddie, and Thea can hear the smile in her voice. 

“I haven’t.” 

“Liar,” says Freddie, and then: “I've never-”

“You don’t have to,” replies Thea breathlessly. “You don’t have to at all.” She’s being honest. These few hours have been more than enough, more than her wildest dreams. She’d be happy to just lay here forever, her head on Freddie’s bare skin, closer to her than she’d ever been with anyone else. She knows she must have that same stupid starry-eyed look on her face. 

“No,” says Freddie suddenly, forcefully, “I want to,” and the solid, domineering way she says  _ want  _ makes a jolt run through Thea’s insides like she’s been struck by lightning. Freddie sits up a little, forcing Thea to lift her head from her skin, and swings her body over so that she’s on top of her again. 

Freddie has a hair tie around her wrist: she keeps it there for track and cheerleading and basketball. She flips her frizzy hair up into a ponytail, raking it back from her face and securing it with the elastic. Thea watches her gaze travel up and down her body.

“You have a hot body too,” Freddie says, and then her lips are on a part of Thea that no one’s kissed before, and Thea’s neck falls back into the pillow, her eyes on the tilted ceiling, surrendering herself completely to the thing she's fantasized about for so long. 

Thea’s so worked up from the makeup lesson that it doesn’t take long. She feels herself shudder, stops moving against Freddie and lets her body go slack, fireworks exploding in her vision as Freddie climbs back overtop of her to kiss her again on the mouth. She’s shivering when Freddie gets there, the two of them kissing lazy and hard, Freddie’s teeth dragging every so often against her lip or bumping her tongue. Finally Freddie sits up again, sits right on Thea’s stomach so that she’s almost squashing her, skinny as she was. 

“Did Joanie ever make you feel like that?” 

“You sound jealous.” 

“Maybe I am.” Freddie pokes her. “Answer the question.” 

That stupid grin is on Thea’s lips again. She can’t remember the last time she smiled like this. “No,” she replies truthfully. “Never.” 

“ _ Fuck _ that psycho bitch.” Freddie bends down and kisses her again, hard. Freddie’s jealousy is the hottest thing she’s ever seen, and Thea pulls Freddie down against her with a laugh. 

“I fucking love y-” 

Thea cuts herself off before the last word can get out, cringing internally at how close she’d been to the ultimate mistake, swallowing hard and nervous against Freddie’s shoulder. “... that you’re jealous,” she recovers far too belatedly, her heart pounding so hard she’s sure they can both hear it. “I love that you’re jealous.” 

If Freddie senses the awkwardness, she doesn’t push, only smooching Thea gently and cuddling up next to her. They share a few lingering kisses, Freddie’s knee slotting in between her legs again, every gesture amplified by the new sensation of having no barriers in between their skin. 

Thea skates her hand up and down Freddie’s bony shoulder. “Did your prissy boyfriend ever do that?” 

“Now who’s jealous?” giggles Freddie, but she leans in and kisses Thea on the lips, her hand nestling in a loose fist right over Thea’s heart. They lay there entwined for a long few minutes before Freddie speaks up. “I’m cold. Shower with me?” 

Thea couldn’t say no if she wanted to. She follows Freddie down the attic stairs to the second floor bathroom, her arms wrapped anxiously around herself even though she knows the house is empty. She stands in the corner of the clean little room as Freddie adjusts the temperature of the water, her eyes skating over all the things that would be foreign in the trailer park: the clean white tub, the cabinet built into the counter, the fluffy mat cut into a U to fit around the toilet, the soap shaped like a fish. When Freddie’s satisfied with the water she pulls Thea by the hand into the spray, drawing the shower curtain closed behind them and pressing their naked bodies back together. 

At first all they do is kiss, Freddie shampooing Thea’s hair for her, working up such a huge lather and paying so little attention to the job between kisses that strawberry foam drips down into their eyes. Thea takes pleasure in doing the same for her friend: Freddie’s hair has gotten longer since September, and she’s careful to rub the shampoo through to the very end. Thea’s turned into the spray to wash her face (it’s Freddie’s soap that’s mango scented, it turns out), when Freddie wraps her arms around her from behind, her hands, slick with mango-smelling lather, pressing flat against Thea’s stomach. 

Freddie’s chin lands on Thea’s shoulder, and she sneaks a kiss to her ear. “Did I make you feel good?” she asks in a whisper, her hands gently massaging soap onto Thea’s belly. 

Thea’s throat is so dry she can barely speak. “Yeah.” 

Freddie’s hands dip a little lower, her nose nuzzling into the space between Thea’s neck and shoulder. “Am I making you feel good now?” 

“Yeah,” replies Thea, her voice suddenly stronger, and in one quick motion she turns and crashes her lips onto Freddie’s, pinning her up against the tile wall as the water spray rains down on their heads and runs in their eyes. 

They don’t get out until the water’s freezing cold. 

Back in Freddie’s bedroom, Thea sits in a fluffy blue towel while Freddie rifles through her closet for some outfit she’s decided would look perfect with Thea’s skin tone. Freddie dresses her in cuffed blue jeans and a clean white tank top, with a yellow button down over the whole ensemble. She shoves a chunky bracelet on Thea’s wrist and brushes her hair over her ears. 

“They’re ripped,” Thea speaks up, fingering a hole on her knee. 

“They’re supposed to be. It’s cool.” 

“Sweet,” replies Thea. The cooler it was to dress like you couldn’t afford better, the more it suited her lifestyle. Freddie drags a stuffed-to-bursting shopping bag out of the depths of her closet and plunks it down next to Thea. 

“These are all the clothes I was going to give to the thrift shop next time I went. They’re all yours if you want.” 

Thea’s never seen that many clothes in one place, unless she’s counting Freddie’s closet floor. The stuff on top looks pretty nice. “Are you sure?” she asks. 

“Come on, you’ll be doing me a favour by taking this stuff off my hands. I’m never going to wear it. You can keep the outfit you’re wearing too.” 

_ Don’t cry _ , Thea chants to herself as Freddie turns back to her messy closet. She’s never felt this touched by someone before, especially over a gesture as stupid as being offered cast-offs. Joanie had given her a new sweater for Christmas once, but she never wanted Thea to be seen wearing anything that had recognizably once been her own. It would take Thea weeks to scrounge up the money to buy anything secondhand at a charity shop - her uniform deposit for football had eaten up all of the savings she’d had from Midvale. 

Satisfied with Thea’s outfit, Freddie dresses quickly in a new pair of jeans and a baseball tee, and sits back on Thea’s lap to carefully redo her makeup. Her skin is damp as well as hot this time, and only the fear of losing an eye to Freddie’s mascara wand keeps Thea from squirming around. 

Freddie’s carefully smudging lip gloss onto Thea’s bottom lip when the sound of a door opening two floors below them breaks through the silence. The chatter of adult voices rises up from the direction of the stairs, and Freddie groans. “My parents.” 

Thea rises from the bed and moves instinctively to the window, meaning to make a quick escape, but Freddie bars her way. “Hey. Why don’t you stay and have dinner with us? Please?” 

“I don’t know…” Thea replies, thinking anxiously of Artie. She hadn’t yet had the chance to bike by the church to scope him out, and the thought of being scrutinized by an honest-to-goodness  _ pastor  _ after she’d just slept with his daughter was terrifying. No way. But Freddie seems to read her mind. 

“Don’t be nervous about my parents. They’re so whacked out since Oscar died that they’ll barely even look at you. Please?” Freddie puts on a pair of very convincing puppy eyes. “I don’t want you to go…” 

Thea can’t hide her smile, stepping a little closer to her friend so she can wrap Freddie in a hug. “I have to.” 

“Well, at least use the front door.” Freddie turns her around so that they’re facing the full-length closet mirror, her chin resting gently on Thea’s shoulder again. “Look at that girl. She can get into any college she wants.” She holds Thea’s chin gently, forcing her to meet her reflection’s eyes. With Freddie’s clothes on the transformation is complete: she could be any Northside girl from a good family. It makes her throat swell. “You think I’d ask that girl to climb down the side of my house? No way.” 

“Fine,” Thea mumbles, trying to hide her smile as Freddie tosses a bunch of cosmetics into the bag of clothes and holds it out to her. A woman’s voice issues up from the stairs: 

“Freddie, are you up there?” 

“I’M HOME!” Freddie bellows. “MY FRIEND’S OVER!” 

With a hand in the small of Thea’s back, she guides her toward the rickety attic stairs, and then walks beside her down the larger carpeted ones. If it weren’t for that hand, Thea might have panicked and run, but Freddie’s palm against her spine inspires a funny calmness. 

“This is Thea,” Freddie introduces her when they hit the landing. Thea appreciates that she keeps walking her toward the door. “She’s in my homeroom and chemistry classes. We were working on homework.” 

“Good for you,” replies the woman who must be Freddie’s mother, though she does seem more than a little distracted. She has a nice blue cardigan on, but her skirt is wrinkled like she’d forgotten to iron it, and her blonde hair is unbrushed and flyaway. Her clear blue eyes rove over to her husband, who must be the infamous town pastor, and they stay on his face when she speaks to Thea. “It’s nice to meet you,” she says politely, and Thea nods awkwardly. 

She looks at Artie out of the corner of her eye. He isn’t looking at her at all. Freddie’s dad looks more like she’d expected him to look, your average big, brown-haired middle-aged father. The only difference is that the lines in his face are dark and long, and he looks more like Freddie than she’d been expecting. They have the same nose and eyes. 

“See you, Thea,” says Freddie, pressing the bag of clothes into her hand. She looks so small and sad all of a sudden, standing in between her parents, and Thea kind of hurts, seeing her look like that. She looks into the kitchen for no reason and counts four chairs at the table, and thinks she understands. 

Thea glances awkwardly to the left and sees two school portraits on the wall: the big, obnoxious blue-drop cloth-backgrounded kind you pay a fortune for on picture day. The glass on both is dusty but she can make them out: a young, gap-toothed Freddie and dead Oscar’s handsome face. Both frames are a little crooked. 

“Does your friend want to stay for dinner?” Mrs. Andrews asks. She crosses busily to the portrait of Oscar and dusts it off with a cloth. Then she does the one of Freddie, frowning a little, as though she’d just noticed they needed it. 

“I think she-,” begins Freddie, but Thea meets her eye and nods her head a little, and Freddie goes quiet. Her eyes have a hopeful look in them that makes Thea’s stomach turn over.

“I’d love to,” says Thea instead, and she doesn’t even know why, only that she feels brave in these new clothes, and that Freddie’s big smile after makes it all worthwhile. “If that’s okay.” 


	14. Chapter 14

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> im gonna start writing chapter summaries like episode recaps. 🥰 thea meets her girlfriend's parents and overhears a concerning conversation between her father and another gang member... freddie suffers through sex ed class with alice, hank, marty mantle, and hiram lodge (nickname chlamydia).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> CW for period typical homophobia, use of the d slur ... yall read the trials of cheerleading! 
> 
> i know i say this every time... we'll meet boy!mary and boy!gladys one day.... REAL SOON!!!! I ALREADY KNOW WHAT THEYRE GONNA DO IT JUST TAKES ME SO LONG TO GET THERE 
> 
> im honestly an idiot updating this so often for no one to read but is this new information? no. it is not. laugh at me if you must. its still 2019 so i can excuse my own nonsensical behaviour.

She must be insane, Thea decides. Absolutely, criminally, insane. 

Maybe she  _ wanted _ to get caught. 

That, or the last few hours with Freddie and the little bit of warpaint on her face had instilled in her a dangerous confidence that she really couldn’t afford. 

There were two things that had landed her a one-way ticket out of Midvale: organized religion and kissing other girls. And right now she’s sitting in between the town pastor and the pastor’s daughter who she’d just had sex with, clasping both their hands and saying Grace over the supper table. 

Maybe old habits die hard. 

If there is a God - and Thea gets really scared in moments like this that there is - He’s probably already got the thunderbolts ready. Or maybe He finds it funny. The easiest thing for Thea to believe about God is that he has a sick sense of humour. 

_ “In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.”  _ Thea solemnly mumbles along with Artie’s words like a champ and unclasps her hand from his dry, calloused grip. On the other side, she darts her hand out of Freddie’s almost as quickly. Her heart is thumping like she’s about to be sent onto the football field to win the game. 

It wasn’t the dinner she was scared of necessarily - Thea had been invited to countless family dinners at Joanie’s, and had mastered the rigamarole of offering quiet, measured comments when spoken to and showing delight or surprise to whatever story someone else was telling. There was a subtle art to nodding along to the sound of a parent’s voice, smiling in the right places and frowning in others as you planned your reactions as thoughtfully as football plays. 

That was easy back then, because to Joanie’s family she was always the poor girl from the poor family that Joanie was nice enough to be friends with. No one really expected her to carry the conversation - they thought she considered herself lucky to sit at their table. And she did. 

It wasn’t that Thea blamed Joanie’s mother - looking at the two of them together, anyone would make the same assumption. She was always tomboyish to Joanie’s sophisticated, plain in hand-me-down clothes beside her brightly coloured wardrobe. Thea didn’t go to church, had never dated a boy, and didn’t have any other school friends. Thea made a good and loyal sidekick - she had the key quality of  _ knowing her place.  _ For all these reasons, Joanie’s mother had liked her. 

The last time she had seen Joanie’s mother, the woman had glared at her out of red-rimmed eyes, her usually smiling mouth set so closely that her lips vanished. Her makeup had been smudged and her beautiful, wavy hair yanked back so tight from her face that it looked like it hurt. She hadn’t come nearer than a few feet from Thea, as though she would catch something if she got too close. Pure hatred and fear had billowed out of her eyes like smoke. 

But Freddie’s family doesn’t know her yet, and Thea kind of likes it that way - likes the possibility of being someone different. In her borrowed clothes and her eye makeup, she could easily pass for any of Freddie’s clean-cut, Northside, cul-de-sac friends. She’s expecting a barrage of questions over dinner that she’d wish endlessly for better answers to: her family name, her address, her grades. How she and Freddie had met. 

Only this dinner is quiet. Freddie’s parents aren’t cold, necessarily, but they sure don’t seem interested in talking. Mrs. Andrews silently serves them scoops of casserole, and Mr. Andrews begins tiredly cutting his meat. Every so often he sighs wearily, as though aware of the social obligation of speaking, and that he’ll have to do it sooner than later. 

“Thea’s in my chemistry class,” Freddie speaks up pluckily when no one has asked Thea where they know each other from. Thea feels a spike of pride and sympathy at the upbeat loudness of her voice, so different from the still, musty air of the dining room. She doubts anyone’s cracked a window at the Andrews house for a long while. “We’re doing this project together, and she’s a real lifesaver. She’s the best in our class at chemistry and we’ll definitely get an A. She’s only been at this school a month and she’s already got the best grades.” 

Thea blushes and kicks Freddie under the table, who winks back at her. “Good for you,” says Mr. Andrews, but he says it almost as an afterthought, and only in Thea’s direction. His eyes look over her shoulder into the foyer. 

Thea smiles awkwardly and puts a scoop of food in her mouth. It was almost worth putting herself in the lion’s den just for this food. It beat slinking home to mouldy bread and her stash of pepperoni sticks, and even  _ she  _ was beginning to tire of Pop’s hamburgers. She braces herself for a follow-up question, but it doesn’t come. Instead the room is dead silent. 

Freddie goes quiet too, looking sadly from her father to her mother, but neither of them say anything more. Artie is focused on his plate, and Bunny has turned her head to stare at the back door off the kitchen, as though she’s waiting for a fifth person to come through. 

Artie clears his throat. “You just moved here, Thea?” His voice is hoarse and quite small. 

“Yessir,” Thea replies politely, her fear ebbing as she looks at Artie up close. He looks stern, but he mostly looks tired. He scratches his throat, leaving red marks where his nails pass over his adam’s apple. There’s shaving foam caught on the side of his neck, and a scrap of tissue where he’d cut himself. 

“And you like your new house?” 

House. Her disguise had worked then: she did look like she lived on a cul-de-sac. “Yessir. It’s a nice house.” 

No reply - it scarcely mattered that she had lied. Artie glances at his wife, who stands up abruptly and starts clearing her full plate to the sink. Then she returns to the table and starts wiping around the salt and pepper shaker before she sits back down and looks at the door again. 

The adrenaline is beginning to wear off of Thea, and her good mood from kissing Freddie with it. This house was weird and this dinner was weird, and her sympathy for upbeat, funny, shining Freddie Andrews having to eat dinner in this madhouse every night is making her feel kind of sick. The longer Freddie sits between her parents the sadder she looks - she’s sinking down lower and lower in her chair like a flower wilting. 

It’s completely against her nature, but Thea suddenly wants to start talking. Loudly. Wants to tell them that their daughter is the greatest person she’s ever met, wants to shake out a bunch of bold faced lies about how her dad makes six figures a year and they live in a house with a driveway and an attic and a maple tree and a tire swing. 

But she knows she’s not completely safe. Nor is she a fool. So she does what she’d always done at Joanie’s house: keeps quiet. She keeps eating politely and doesn’t dare look up. 

“I got an A on my diorama,” speaks up Freddie at last, and Thea can tell she’s been saving this announcement. She smiles at her parents, the light back in her eyes, colourful again against the grey backdrop of the furniture. “Boy, Alice was ticked off! She got a B+ on her part of the project, so it all evens out to an A minus. I thought that was pretty good but she was mad as hops. She never gets an A minus, I guess.” 

No one says anything when she finishes. Finally Mrs. Andrews speaks up woodenly: 

“Maybe you can try for an A plus next time.” 

The smile falls off Freddie’s face. She catches herself and shakes it off, but not before Thea sees the hurt make a home in her features. In that moment Thea wants nothing more than to stand up and belt both of Freddie’s parents in the face with the back of her hand. 

YOUR DAUGHTER GOT A FUCKING A ON HER ASSIGMENT, she wants to yell. ACT LIKE YOU CARE ABOUT HER. 

But she doesn’t. She just eats her peas. 

Dinner goes on for another painful twenty minutes. Thea shovels food into her face like her life depends on it, while Freddie just pokes depressingly at her plate. Artie excuses himself and leaves before dessert even comes out. Mrs. Andrews watches him go with a helpless, forlorn expression on her face. 

“I have to give Thea a ride home,” Freddie speaks up before anyone can say anything else. “She left her bi- um - her car at the school.” 

It’s a weak save, but Mrs. Andrews doesn’t even notice the flub, which makes it even sadder. She forces a weak smile at the pair of them and starts clearing the butter dish. Freddie hops up from the table. 

“C’mon, Thea.” 

“Thank you for dinner,” says Thea politely, but Mrs. Andrews doesn’t turn around. 

Freddie slams the door when they leave, the collar of her jacket turned up not quite high enough to hide the unhappiness in her eyes. She tosses the bag of clothes for Thea into the back of the truck and guns the engine, waiting until Thea’s shut her door before pulling backward out of the driveway. 

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” says Freddie almost immediately. “They’re always like that. It wasn’t you.” 

“It’s okay,” says Thea awkwardly, not knowing what else to say. “It really is. It’s fine.” 

She turns her gaze to the window, watching the suburban houses roll past. There’s a lot she could say here - a lot about how she knew better than anyone what it was to have an uncomfortable home life. But that fear still holds her back - the fear of letting anyone close enough to know anything about her, the fear of being vulnerable. She swallows a lump in her throat and resolves to try. 

“My parents - my mom left when I was a little kid. And my dad’s never forgiven me for it. He mostly just drinks.” She swallows hard again, filing the physical abuse away for another conversation. It hadn’t happened in a long time. Maybe it was over. “He’s not working right now. That’s why we can’t afford anything.” 

Freddie’s looking at her, her face so soft and open and honest that Thea can’t look her right in the eyes. Freddie surely knows that this admission meant more than simply the words she was sharing - this was Thea trusting her, in a way she’d seriously made up her mind to never trust again. The truck slows to a stop, and Thea keeps staring at the top button on Freddie’s jacket, her face growing warm and her eyes feeling sore. Not with tears. Surely not with tears. Thea wasn’t the type to cry. 

“I’m sorry,” says Freddie, and then she’s hugging her, unbuckling her seatbelt and wrapping Thea up in her arms with a ferocity like they’ve been best friends all their lives. Thea’s hands land in her soft, tangled hair, pressing it to the back of Freddie’s coat. 

“I’m sorry too. I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have to put up with-” 

“They blame me for it,” says Freddie, and her voice comes out so small and choked up that Thea’s stomach aches to hear it. “They blame me for Oscar-” 

“Hey. No, they don’t.” 

Freddie pushes back from Thea, wiping her face messily and shaking her head. “You saw them-” 

“They don’t blame you. It wasn’t your fault. They know that. You’re just upset.” 

Freddie covers her face with both hands. “I’m sorry,” she says, but Thea isn’t sure who she’s apologizing to. 

“It wasn’t your fault, Freddie.” 

Freddie slowly lowers her hands down, her eyes wet, already knowing Thea well enough to pass the comfort back. “It wasn’t your fault either. Your mom.” 

Thea shrugs self-deprecatingly.  _ Look at me. _ “I don’t blame her.” 

A spark enters Freddie’s eyes, and she grabs Thea by the arms. “Hey. No way. None of that. Do you know how amazing you are? You’re a  _ fucking amazing _ football player. You’re better than any boy at this school. You beat out all those guys for the spot. You’re getting me straight A’s in chemistry without ever reading the syllabus. You already know you want to go to college, and you look fucking _ incredible _ in my eye makeup. You-” 

Thea pushes forward and kisses Freddie on the lips, cutting off the rest of the sentence. They’re sitting at the curb near the high school, the sun having only barely gone down, where just about anyone could see them. But Thea’s too far gone for this girl to let common sense stop her.

Still, Freddie seems to read her mind. “We shouldn’t do this in public anymore,” she cautions, playing with Thea’s fingers on the seat when they break breathlessly apart. Her hands are so soft. “It’s risky. Everyone in this town knows everything about everybody else.” 

“But in private?” 

“In private…” Freddie grins and she leans forward to whisper in Thea’s ear. Thea bites her lip as she feels her face heat up in an uncharacteristic blush. Freddie leans back and shoots her a devilish smile. “How’s that?” 

“I should go,” Thea teases, reaching out for the door and drumming her fingers on the handle. Her good mood is back, just like that.  _ Fuck you, Joanie, _ she thinks.  _ And you too, Dad.  _

“You sure you don’t want a ride? I can put your bike in the back.” 

Thea just shakes her head. “No thanks.” 

Freddie waits in her truck as Thea climbs astride the cold metal of her motorbike, clipping her helmet on. Thea jerks her head at the road. “Go on,” she says to her friend. Freddie rolls down the window despite the cold air to hear her better. “I don’t want that heap of junk to break down after I’m on my way.” 

“Fine.” Freddie rolls the window back up with a laugh and presses her hand against the glass as a goodbye. It leaves the imprint of her five fingers and palm in the mist before the truck drives off with a cacophony of pops and rattles that could wake the dead. 

The wind whips through Thea’s hair as she guns the engine and speeds out of the parking lot. For the first time in a long time, she grins all the way home. 

* * *

There’s a strange bike in front of the Jones trailer when she pulls up, which usually means her father has one of his drinking buddies over. Sure enough, cracking open the trailer door reveals an unfamiliar body in her father’s recliner, and a few dozen empty beer bottles scattered across the room like torn up wrapping paper on Christmas morning. Thea keeps to the shadows as she edges through the room and toward her bed. 

“Where’s your manners, girl?” Her father, for having named her -  _ with his own fucking name _ \- sure wasn’t fond of using it. She was usually  _ girl  _ to him, unless she was in trouble, in which case Forsythe used words Thea rarely found cause to repeat. He jerks his head to the behemoth of a man sitting next to him - a huge, round-faced guy with one eye and grizzled hair. Their matching jackets shine in the lamplight like oil. “Show some fucking respect.” 

Thea steps forward to shake the stranger’s hand - it feels as cold and clammy as the dead. He gives her a rotten smile and looks her up and down like she’s a piece of meat. Thea’s all too aware that she’s wearing lipstick. 

Her dad notices it too. He stands up and steps toward her, towering over her and shielding her from the gaze of the other Serpent as he blasts his liquor breath directly in her eye. “What the hell is on your face?” he growls, his voice low. “You look like a cheap whore.” 

Thea has a smart reply all ready on the tip of her tongue - she’s dangerously good at giving a little back sometimes, enough that it had once cost her a hospital stay back home - but she’s almost in too good of a mood to use it. She feels herself grin at the thought of the past few hours, the fact that she’d done what her father most feared his gang friends would find out about. 

“The fuck are you grinning at?” Her dad seems to get taller in her anger. It’s a toss-up, usually, whether having company over will make her father let her off easy, or whether he’ll rough her up even more for show. Thea’s not sure how to judge this one until Forsythe slaps her face - only it’s lighter than usual, the back of his fingers against her cheek. The sting is almost nothing. “Take that shit off and go to bed.” 

In their terms, it’s almost an _ I love you.  _ Thea hightails it for her tiny trailer bedroom, marveling at her luck, until she hears the other serpent’s voice: 

“She’ll do, alright.” Thea pauses with her door a crack from the frame, feeling suddenly uneasy. “Do well for us. When are they running ‘em?” 

Forsythe grunts in reply. “Soon. Couple of days.” 

Thea eases her door closed very quietly, not wanting to hear anymore. She dresses quickly in a pair of sweats and a Midvale Athletics T-Shirt, crawling onto her foam mattress and pulling the covers up to her chin as she tries to sleep. No matter how frequently her thoughts turn back to Freddie, though, the other serpent’s voice keeps creeping into her mind. 

_ She’ll do well for us.  _

Whatever that meant she wanted no part of it. But she had a feeling her dad wouldn’t take that answer lying down. 

* * *

**Tuesday.**

“Contraceptives.” Howitzer declares, plunking a huge semi-transparent bin full of condoms onto his desk. He turns to the chalkboard and begins writing the word in block letters. “Contraceptives are used to prevent - anyone? Two things. One, to prevent - pregnancy. And the spread of - anyone? The spread of  _ sexually transmitted diseases. _ ” 

Freddie glances at Alice, who’s sitting to her right. All homeroom teachers were forced at various points during the semester to give their students a series of sex ed lectures, and watching Howitzer - a former drill sergeant and U.S. Marine - suffer through teaching a bunch of teenagers about the myriad of ways they could smash their genitals together was no one’s favourite way to spend second period. 

“There’s only one form of contraception that is one hundred percent effective.” Howitzer booms. “Can anyone tell me what that is? Anyone? The one form of contraceptive that is one hundred percent effective is- Miss Blossom?” 

Penelope Blossom’s hand had shot way up in the front row. “Abstinence,” she answers primly, her voice soft as she blushes to the roots of her fiery red hair. 

Alice rolls her eyes hugely. After all these years, Freddie can read her best friend’s mind without effort. 

_ Because Penelope knows so much about abstinence, _ Alice snarks telepathically.  _ We all know what she gets up to at those Greendale parties.  _

_ Be nice _ , Freddie chides her mentally, shooting Alice a warning look out of the corner of her eye.  _ You hate when people say that stuff about you.  _

Last year at this time, Marty Mantle had stood up during the teen pregnancy unit and suggested that Alice Smith pay special attention and that everyone who didn’t live in the trailer park be excused from class. Alice had burst into tears and Freddie, acting on impulse, had grabbed the thermos of lukewarm coffee off of Hiram’s desk and flung the whole mess in Marty’s face. Then she’d thrown her chair over. The whole stunt had got her two days detention (while Marty got off scot free!) but Alice’s tears had dried up almost immediately, and that was what really mattered. Plus, it had been Coach Kleats teaching them sex ed that year, and he’d looked pretty happy that Freddie had ruined the whole day’s lesson. 

Alice narrows her eyes at Freddie now. _ I can’t believe you’re on Penelope’s side _ , she signals her with another flick of her eyes.  _ She’s a bitch.  _

_ Hal likes her.  _ Freddie fires back, raising her eyebrows. 

_ Hal’s an idiot.  _

“She’s not a bitch,” Freddie whispers, and Alice gives her a weird look. Oops. She’d said that out loud. Maybe they’d got their wires crossed. 

“Can anyone name a sexually transmitted disease? Anyone?” Howitzer looks like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world as he looks around their classroom and consults the aged textbook in front of him. Freddie’s pretty sure her parents learned sex ed out of the same book. “Chlamydia. Chlamydia is a sexually transmitted disease. Can anyone name another-” 

Freddie rips a page of lined paper out of her spiral notebook and uncaps her purple gel pen. 

_ I hear Hiram Lodge has a raging case of clamidia  _ she writes, and hands it off to Alice, nodding her head toward Hank’s desk. 

“Pass this to Hank.” 

Alice shakes her head at her, but does it - though not before fixing Freddie’s spelling. 

“Public lice. Pubic lice is another sexually transmitted disease. Can anyone-”

Marty Mantle’s hand goes up and waves around in the air. “AIDS,” he announces, and twists all the way around in his seat to give Freddie a stare. 

“Yes, thank you. AIDS, or HIV.” Howitzer writes the three letters on the board. “Can anyone tell me how HIV is transmitted? Anyone? HIV is transmitted by-”

Marty turns back around and puts his hand right back up in the air. “Dykes.” he says cooly. 

Freddie goes very still. 

Howitzer blinks at Marty for a moment, and seems to decide the best course of action is just to start talking over him. “Bodily fluids,” he continues in a slightly louder voice. “HIV is transmitted by bodily fluids. The virus enters your body by-” 

“Dykes.” says Marty again. Howitzer fixes him with a frustrated stare over the cover of the textbook. 

“Pardon me?” he asks tiredly. 

A few people gasp suddenly, and Penelope cries out in fright. It’s not until Alice tugs hard on her sleeve that Freddie realizes she's stood up. Her heart is pounding hard and angry, and her hands are clenched so tightly into fists that her palms sting from her nails. 

Marty smiles pleasantly and gestures toward Freddie. He opens his mouth with a smirk on his face, but whatever else he had planned to say, he never gets the chance. Before Alice can stop her, Freddie picks up her whole desk off the ground and throws it across the room to hit with a crash against the blackboard. 

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” she yells at Marty, the voice tearing out of some deep place inside her before she’s even aware that she’s screaming. “SHUT THE FUCK UP, BITCH!” 

The class is stunned into silence. Marty, who had briefly looked truly terrified, now starts laughing like it’s the funniest thing he’s ever heard. Freddie can feel Alice pulling hard on her arm, but she shakes her off. 

“WHAT IS YOUR FUCKING PROBLEM!?” she yells at Howitzer instead. “ARE YOU NOT GOING TO DO ANYTHING?” 

The class has started to laugh nervously along with Marty. 

“ANDREWS YOU’RE OUT OF LINE!” Howitzer bellows over them in his drill sergeant voice. “REPORT TO THE OFFICE NOW.” 

“WHAT ABOUT HIM!?” Freddie howls. Her voice is nearing hysteria and she knows she’s losing all hope of being taken seriously, but she doesn’t care. “WHAT ABOUT HIM!!!???” 

“ANDREWS! THE OFFICE!” 

“YOU LET HIM SAY THAT!” 

“ANDREWS!” 

Howitzer starts striding toward her, and Freddie feels her face burn beet red as the cacophony of student laughter finally reaches her ears. She turns around fast before Howitzer can come any closer, sprinting for the door and slamming it so hard into its frame that the reinforced glass rattles. 

“Freddie!” Alice yells after her, her voice muffled behind the door, and then louder. The sound of her slapping Doc Martens rings out as she chases her out the door and across the school. “Freddie!” 

Freddie just turns on the speed. She can hear Marty’s stupid laugh ringing in her ears all the way down the hall. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if anyone has any interest in this fic whatsoever please comment... if i continue to see absolutely no interest (which is what i am seeing currently) im going to be forced to abandon it and i will feel like this
> 
> this is not to say im not grateful for my readers, i am...if you read this far, thank you!


End file.
